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THE CHALLENGE 

°f 

MODERN CRITICISM 



TREE OF KNOWLEDGE 

UNIFORM WITH THIS VOLUME 



Percy Holmes Boynton 

THE CHALLENGE OF MODERN CRITICISM 

Tom Peete Cross 

HARPER AND BARD 

Robert Morss Lovett 

PREFACE TO FICTION 

Adolf Carl Noe 

FERNS, FOSSILS AND FUEL 

Louise Marie Spaeth 

MARRIAGE AND FAMILY LIFE AMONG STRANGE PEOPLES 

James Westfall Thompson 

THE LIVING PAST 































PERCY HOLMES BOYNTON 

PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO 


THE CHALLENGE OF 
MODERN CRITICISM 


TRADITION —CRITICISM —HUMANISM 


A series of lec¬ 
tures transcribed 
by Grace Kiner 


THOMAS S. ROCKWELL COMPANY 

1931 CHICAGO 


PUBLISHERS 




psi* 

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COPYRIGHT, 1931, BY 
THOMAS S. ROCKWELL COMPANY 
CHICAGO 


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* . 


Printed in United States of America 


©CIA 38363 


MAY 22 193! 


CONTENTS 


From Sherwood Anderson 

9 

ONE 

America Wakes Up 

11 

TWO 

Mr. Mencken Does His Bit 

29 

THREE 

The Defence of Tradition 

47 

FOUR 

America and the Old World 

67 


FIVE 

America at Home 

85 


six 

The Hubbub Over Humanism 

104 


Book Lists 

125 


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FROM SHERWOOD ANDERSON; 


W HEN one thinks of America as it was, but a few 
generations ago, a vast wilderness across which 
railroads had to be laid, whose forests had to be cut away 
and whose cities were yet to be built, one can understand 
that there was a time in America when to be perpetually 
on the go, to be a hustler and a go-getter, was a kind 
of moral duty. 

Then, perhaps there was no time to be wasted in this 
foolishness of trying to understand each other, of trying 
to really call up before ourselves, through the world of 
our artists, something of the inner quality of lives. To 
be a go-getter was then perhaps a moral duty. A tree 
might have fallen on the head of the pioneer who for 
a moment lost himself in the effort to understand his 
neighbor. Alertness was the mood of the times. 

It may now be that a time has come to ask ourselves 
questions: 

Are our lives worth living? 


9 







CHALLENGE OF MODERN CRITICISM 


Is it living at all to spend all our best years in helping 
build cities larger, increase the number and size of our 
factories, build up individual fortunes, make more dirt 
and noise and indulge in an ever increasingly louder talk 
of progress? 

Or is there a quieter, more leisurely and altogether 
more charming way of life we might begin to live, here 
in America, instead of having to run off to Europe to 
find it? 

Whether the time has come to ask the question or not, 
it is being asked. That is the most important question 
the younger generation is asking, a sharp and ever more 
searching criticism of all the old American shibboleths 
is going on. In the future ... we will have less 
loud talk of freedom and a more determined individual 
effort to find freedom for expression of lives. 

The simple fact of the matter is that if America will 
but begin to turn more of its natural vitality into the 
Arts, . . . and also if we can bear, without too 

much flinching, a determined criticism, I myself believe 
that the center of culture for the whole western world 
may be shifted to America. 


10 







ONE 

AMERICA WAKES UP 

I N THE years before 1910 there was little criticism 
of American life and American literature, in print 
or out. A critic could not sell his copy to the magazines, 
even if he thought it worth his while to write it. This 
was the best country in the best of all possible worlds. 
The orators said so, the teachers said so, all the books 
and magazines and newspapers repeated it. But in 1913 
John Macy published a small volume of essays called 
“The Spirit of American Literature.” In the first 
sentence of the first chapter he announced that American 
literature was a branch of English literature. Then he 
added insult to injury by proclaiming that the American 
spirit in literature was a myth, that American literature 
was only a province of the empire of English literature. 
Next he asked if it was a virtue or a vice that these things 
were true. He did not answer his own question when 
he said that American literature was not provincial 
enough. Americans, at least those that were being read 


11 













CHALLENGE OF MODERN CRITICISM 


widely, did not write about their own province. Instead 
they were going to Europe and writing about Venice, 
or translating German ballads, or inditing sonnets to 
Mount Blanc. The insult was complete when he said: 
“American literature is on the whole idealistic, sweet, 
delicate, nicely finished. There is little of it which might 
not have appeared in the Youth’s Companion ’’ In 
parenthesis one wonders what will be the standard of 
sweet harmlessness in literature since the Youth’s Com¬ 
panion has combined with the American Boy. 

Mr. Macy’s book is significant because it is one df 
the first American attempts since Poe to criticise literature 
apart from morality. He was the first of a host of 
contemporary critics who were to attempt to break away 
from the old tradition that literature was good or bad 
according to whether the author or the characters led 
moral or immoral lives. 

More important than Mr. Macy’s volume is a little 
book which soon followed from Van Wyck Brooks called 
America’s Coming of Age, a book which looks beyond 
literature to life. It is difficult to separate the two; life 
has a tendency to become literature; and literature has 
a habit of passing over into life; so that the criticism 
of life and criticism of literature are often the same thing. 
The contemporary critics of America, of whom Mr. 


12 



AMERICA WAKES UP 


Brooks is one of the earliest, devote their time, very 
largely, to criticisms of life. They hope in that way to 
influence literature. When they do criticise books they 
do it on the basis of what they believe about the life that 
is depicted. 

Long ago, Matthew Arnold, one of the greatest English 
critics, pointed out that a time of true creative activity 
must be preceded by a time of criticism; that it was not 
until criticism had done its work that great literature 
was written. Criticism provides for the creative artist a 
background of opinion against which he does his work, 
and Mr. Macy and Mr. Brooks were taking the first steps 
in forming such a background in America. Criticism is 
always the result of curiosity, Arnold said further, and 
curiosity is the result of comfortable leisure. And again: 
“For the creation of a master-work of literature, two 
powers must concur, the power of the man and the power 
of the moment, and the man is not enough without the 
moment, and the moment is not enough without the man; 
the creative power has for its happy exercise, appointed 
elements, and these elements are not in its control.” 

There have recently appeared in America many active 
critics, though it is too soon to tell if any great work of 
creative genius has been produced. Perhaps so far the 
critics have been occupied in preparing the way for 


13 




CHALLENGE OF MODERN CRITICISM 


the “time of true creative activity,” so that when the man 
comes the moment will be ready for him. A considerable 
background of opinion has been formed, and, as Mr. 
J. B. Yeats has said, “The fiddles are tuning all over 
Ajnerica.” 

It would be a great mistake to think that the United 
States had produced no active critics before the twentieth 
century. There was much earlier criticism in America, 
but it was mainly polite writing about polite literature. 
The public paid scant attention to any of the truly native 
writers, as they did to the truly American critics. Poe 
as a critic has been almost forgotten; to most people he 
was a writer of tales of horror and rather vague poetry. 
Young colonials like Freneau, Brackenridge, and John 
Trumbull tried to wake up America and set her to thinking 
independently even before she had taken any definite 
steps toward being free politically. Others tried the 
awakening process as time went on. Emerson delivered 
his famous address, The American Scholar, in which 
he urged his countrymen to think for themselves, to write 
their own books, to free themselves from English spiritual 
domination as they had freed themselves from her political 
control. But America still slept. 

Public attention was fixed on polite literature addressed 
to the gentle reader. It was furnished in the magazines. 


14 



AMERICA WAKES UP 


The North American, the Knickerbocker, the Southern 
Literary Messenger, Harper s, the Atlantic, all gave it 
the stamp of their approval. Some of them, since there 
was no international copyright law, clipped English polite 
literature—which was, if anything, just a little politer than 
our own—from English periodicals and published it 
without payment. Everybody read it; the people who 
weren’t anybody read Beadle’s bloodthirsty dime novels. 
A common man wrote Leaves of Grass and lost his 
government job in consequence. When Cooper took 
violent issue with the times he was scolded and abused 
until he retreated a sadder and poorer man. For long 
years no respectable publishing firm would risk a 
Whittier volume; Emerson, on account of the frightful 
heresy of the Divinity School Address, in which he 
asked if there was never to be any more revealed religion 
as if God were dead, was on the Harvard blacklist for 
nearly thirty years. When they took him off the blacklist 
they put him on the Board of Overseers! Thoreau’s 
essay on Civil Disobedience, written after he had been 
in jail for refusing to pay taxes for the support of a 
nation that countenanced slavery, was discretely over¬ 
looked. Even Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter was almost 
completely ignored in contemporary criticism, a fact that 
would probably not have been true if Poe had been alive 


IS 



CHALLENGE OF MODERN CRITICISM 


at the time it was published. No one ever paid serious 
attention to the writing of an obscure young man named 
Herman Melville until very modem times. 

The lack, then, was not in the material written; it was 
in the public attitude toward that material. The literature 
that was read was addressed to an American who had 
grown up, as Mr. Brooks expressed it “in a sort of orgy 
of lofty examples, moralized poems, national anthems, 
and baccalaureate sermons.” But this same American 
had never been taught that these high ideals had anything 
to do with his personal conduct. What he had been led 
to believe was that his whole object in life was to get 
together, in any possible fashion, all the goods that he 
could. Making a living was not a means to an end; it 
was the end. The American ideal of success, wished 
even today for every graduating school and college boy, 
is that in the shortest possible time he may accumulate 
the largest possible amount of things he does not need. 
“He had been encouraged to assume that the world was 
a stamping ground for every untrained, greedy and 
aggressive impulse in him, that, in short, society is a fair 
prey for what he can get out of it.” The only effect 
that his knowledge of fine ideals had on him was to make 
him lie to himself about why he was amassing a fortune. 
He told himself—and others—that he was doing it for 


16 



AMERICA WAKES UP 


the sake of his wife, or his children, or his country. 
Actually he was doing it for the joy that he got out of 
the feeling of power that making and spending money 
gave him. This capacity for self-deception was one of 
the first things that the contemporary critics had to fight. 
The polite attitude toward American life and literature 
persisted until the early twentieth century. We had the 
men, but not the moment; Harold Frederic, Stephen 
Crane, Lafcadio Hearn, and Ambrose Bierce are good 
examples of men without the moment. 

There were five reasons why the country waked up in 
the first years of the new century: The United States be¬ 
came a world power, the frontier closed and the industrial 
situation tightened up, the tide of immigration increased 
and changed in character, science advanced and religion 
lost its hold on the minds of men, and the new educational 
methods began to bear fruit. 

The Civil War had not brought any changes in the 
American attitude of mind. The little flurry over Mason 
and Slidell did not result in any international challenge. 
There was nothing stimulating in the deadening “return 
to normalcy” that came after it. Nowhere is this lack 
of stimulation to the minds of Americans shown better 
than in the books of General Lew Wallace. He had 
been through the entire war; during much of it he had 


17 



CHALLENGE OF MODERN CRITICISM 


been an important General. He knew the stirring life 
on the Southwestern frontier. Yet after the conflict did 
he write on these themes? He did not. He wrote 
entertaining and intensely moral tales of the Wandering 
Jew and the early Christian era. We were still a “province 
in the empire of English literature.” 

1. But the Spanish American war did bring to America 
a new sense of strength. For the first time America could 
count itself a world power, with world-wide possessions 
and responsibilities. Then Americans began to look about 
and try to see how America compared with those other 
countries that had been world powers for generations. 
What they saw was wealth, military and naval power, 
broad lands, and mechanical progress. That was suffi¬ 
ciently gratifying. But in literature and art and living 
the view was not so pleasant. America had stood still 
for more than fifty years. Hence men like Mr. Macy and 
Mr. Brooks began to point out why; but the new strength 
was not to be used until the World War had completed 
the feeling of emancipation from the old traditions. The 
moment had come for the new critics to assail the standards 
of polite literature and polite living. 

2. As long as there was open land in the west men had 
a way of escape. They felt that they could go there and 
take up new homesteads and be free. There was always 


18 



AMERICA WAKES UP 


opportunity somewhere else. They might not take the 
chance, but the thought of it gave freedom to their 
imaginations. With the glorious west to dream about— 
kept more glorious by the authors who wrote about it— 
a man did not need to worry about altering life in the 
east. He could just leave it for a new clean country, 
where life could be rebuilt exactly to heart’s desire. But 
with the west closed, men were put—boxed. There was 
no escape. There was nothing to think about but condi¬ 
tions at home. When men looked about and found that 
those conditions were not all that they should have been, 
they began to criticise. 

At the time that the frontier closed, the industrial 
situation tightened up. Great corporations came into the 
control of industry. Private enterprise and free compe¬ 
tition lost ground. Labor saving devices cut down on 
the use of men in factories. Employment was not so easy 
to get. In industry, too, men’s minds were shut into the 
present and into the place at hand, and they began to 
see that neither time nor place was all that it might be. 

3. Immigration increased and changed in character. 
After 1890 it multiplied rapidly. Before that date most 
of the newcomers had been north Europeans, Germans, 
English, Irish, Swedes, Norwegians. After that time 
they were from south and central Europe; Italians, Greeks, 


19 



CHALLENGE OF MODERN CRITICISM 


Poles, Bohemians. They came so fast that America was 
unable to assimilate them; there were too many for the 
melting pot. As a consequence they settled in the eastern 
cities in groups that spoke the languages and carried on 
the customs and traditions of their native homes. New 
York came to have more Italians than Rome, more Irish 
than Dublin, more Greeks than Athens. They did their 
share toward making employment harder to get. They 
were one of the factors in the awakening of America. 
From these foreigners have come some of the keenest 
critics of America. They could judge us against the 
background of European culture. They came here 
believing that America was the land of opportunity, of 
freedom, of release from all that made Europe distasteful, 
and they spoke their disappointment. 

4. The period after 1890 was a time of scientific research 
and discovery. The great industries needed science for 
their development. The crowded cities called for science 
to show them how to get good water, how to care for 
their sick, and how to avoid pestilence. Men went from 
America to foreign universities and brought back the 
scientific discoveries of Europe. They brought back, too, 
a more critical attitude toward their old beliefs. Here, 
in science, was a new world to take the place of the frontier 
that was closed. Students rediscovered Darwin. Evolu- 


20 



AMERICA WAKES UP 


tion seemed to give the answer to the question of the 
origin of life. Soon the biologists and chemists showed 
that man’s body reacted just as did the substances in 
their test tubes. They made of man in their theories 
only a machine reacting to stimuli just as did any 
mechanical device. And some of the writers thought 
that the chemical-mechanical theory solved the problems 
of human behavior. To many, religions seemed to have 
no place in this well-ordered scientific world. Students 
could see no way to reconcile Darwin and a literal reading 
of the first chapters of Genesis. Darwin seemed to have 
proven his points completely, and the proofs of religion 
were intangible and only in the minds of men. Religion 
lost much of its hold. There were attempts to protect 
its teachings by law, but they were the subjects of ridicule. 
The true scientist said: “I do not know.” Others less 
wise said all over America: “It can’t be proved, so it isn’t 
true.” 

5. About 1915 the new educational methods that had 
been instituted because of the influence of men like John 
Dewey, G. Stanley Hall, and William James began to 
bear fruit. These men had said that children were not 
bad, that they should not be curbed and checked and 
forced into molds, but that they should be encouraged 
to develop, to think for themselves and to express them- 


21 



CHALLENGE OF MODERN CRITICISM 


selves. Schools relaxed their insistence on memory work 
and urged thinking as well. They dropped much of the 
Latin and Greek from the curriculum and placed emphasis 
on science, on the study of literature, and on history. 
The study of literature meant Shakespeare, Tennyson, 
Browning, Poe, Whitman. History meant all history, not 
just that of the United States. Religion was no longer 
taught in the schools, a step which helped to loosen its 
hold on the minds of children who were studying science 
instead. These young people were not to go out from 
school and accept the world as they found it without 
question. 

Randolph Bourne was one of this younger generation 
when he wrote in 1911 a series of essays called Youth 
and Life . He carried on the work that Mr. Macy and 
Mr. Brooks had started. They stirred curiosity and 
criticism; he was to attack tradition as a spokesman of 
youth. Said he: “Youth is the incarnation of reason 
pitted against the rigidity of tradition. Youth puts the 
remorseless questions to everything that is old and estab¬ 
lished,—Why? What is this thing good for? And 
when it gets the mumbled, evasive answers of the defenders, 
it applies its own fresh, clean spirit of reason to institutions, 
customs, and ideas, and, finding them stupid, inane, or 
poisonous, turns instinctively to overthrow them and build 


27 



AMERICA WAKES UP 


in their place the things with which its vision teems.” 
Here is the fruit of the new educational methods, youth 
hopeful for the future, youth with vast energy, a vast 
scorn of things as they are, but with nothing to fight 
for. One of the purposes of criticism was to give youth 
something to use that energy for, to point out the causes 
that needed his help. 

Mr. Bourne speaks of the “rigidity of tradition.” 
What is this tradition that has held America in its grasp 
for a century? Why must the young critics attack it— 
or defend it as the case may be? Before we go further 
let us examine it. 

The old tradition was founded on Puritanism. When 
the Puritans came to America they brought with them a 
set of rules for conduct. Those rules they handed down 
through all the generations after them. The central 
belief was that all life should be based on goodness— 
morality. All art and literature was judged by how well 
or how ill it upheld morality. Even today thousands of 
high school children are answering in their book reports 
the question: “What is the lesson that the author tried 
to teach?” The tradition meant control, control of 
emotions, of impulses. It was suspicious of pure pleasure. 
Things must be good for something. Truth and beauty 
were the handmaidens of this morality. It was the natural 


23 



CHALLENGE OF MODERN CRITICISM 


viewpoint of a people who were concerned chiefly with 
the saving of their souls. Morality was the bulwark of 
the home, the church, the school, the marketplace. 
When it developed into “Victorianism” in the second half 
of the last century, it became a matter of ideals. Children 
were taught ideals of conduct, ideals of purity, of 
patriotism, of honor. The tradition was responsible for 
polite literature—literature that was largely divorced from 
life—that was about men and women who had sensibilities 
instead of emotions, ideals instead of desires. The rigid 
Puritan degenerated in his twentieth century descendant 
to a conventional public censor. This descendant could 
see no need of change. His mind ran smoothly in the 
rut made for him by centuries of deference to the same 
conventions. 

But to the new generation that was the product of a 
world in which there was no frontier, in which science 
had driven out religion, in which the new educational 
methods were bearing fruit, there was need for investi¬ 
gation of the worth of this old tradition. Mr. Brooks 
is chiefly interested in the forming of a background of 
discussion. He wants to make people think. He does not 
quarrel with Puritanism because he hates it, as so many 
other critics have done, but because it has been a mixed 
tradition and the good things about it have been constantly 


24 



AMERICA WAKES UP 


at war with the bad qualities. He does not want to do 
away with tradition, but rather to go on through 
Puritanism to something better. In his America s 
Coming of Age he issued the call to debate. “How 
can one speak of progress,” he said, “in a people like 
our own that so send up to heaven the stench of atrophied 
personality? How can any race have progress when all 
it has to go by is an instinct that it must make money? 
The first work for our thinkers must be to create a back¬ 
ground of ideas strong enough to define the issues of 
American life.” It is the formation of this background 
of ideas that is, according to Mr. Arnold, the service 
of criticism. 

“America is a vast Sargasso Sea,” said Mr. Brooks, 
“a prodigious welter of unconscious life, swept by ground- 
swells of half-conscious emotion. All manner of living 
things are drifting in it . . . everywhere an unchecked, 
uncharted, unorganized vitality like that of the first chaos. 
It is a welter of life which has not been worked into an 
organism, into which fruitful values and standards of 
humane economy have not been introduced, innocent of 
those laws of social gravitation which, rightly understood 
and pursued with a fine faith, produce a fine temper in 
the human animal.” 

Mr. Brooks sees two great weaknesses in the past. 


25 



CHALLENGE OF MODERN CRITICISM 


First, America has been too preoccupied with conquest 
and acquisitiveness, with a consequent suppression of 
individuality, and sacrifice of human spirit. The conquest 
was the result of the youth of the nation. America grew 
so fast from a tiny group of colonies along the Atlantic 
seaboard to a nation stretching from coast to coast, that 
she had no time to develop anything but conquerers along 
the way. In the settling of the frontier a type of freedom- 
loving pioneers did emerge, but they had no time for 
anything but settlement. In any conquest, be it of land 
or money or religion, the individual must be submerged 
in the cause if the cause is to succeed. Even one man alone 
on a new farm has no time to develop anything but the 
soil. The making of a great fortune means that the best 
faculty of a man has been spent in money getting. The 
second weakness is the springing up of a new individual¬ 
ism without any objective but self-expression; for these 
new individualists did not know what they were to express. 
They had no objectives. Out of this Sargasso Sea of 
American life it was the business of the critics of life 
and literature to salvage balances and standards. 

The old tradition did not take into account the changes 
of American life. The followers of the tradition did 
not reckon with the advance of science, the change of 
social conditions, and the vast disorder that was America. 


26 



AMERICA WAKES UP 


Talent in America was going to waste because there was 
no standard for it to work by, no criticism to show it 
where to go, no authority to help it choose an objective. 
The issues needed definition, so that the new writers 
might know where they were going, or where there was 
a chance of going. They needed goals, objectives. The 
business of defining the issues was the business of criticism. 

But before criticism could define issues there must be 
discussion. The questions of life and literature in America 
must be talked over. It must be decided if the old 
tradition would serve for the new conditions. Therefore 
Mr. Brooks called for debate. There were those to 
answer the call; those to shatter the walls of the old faiths 
with the shots of ridicule, those to defend the old traditions, 
those to offer new faith. 

America needed a new faith. She had outgrown the 
old. Religion did not offer it, Science could only say: 
“This much we have found out. Beyond this we cannot 
tell.” The old tradition could only say that there was 
no need of change. Paul Elmer More, one of the critics 
who answered the call with a new faith made on the 
foundations of the old said: “Before we have an 
American literature, we must have an American criticism.” 
Mr. Brooks, speaking for young America said that there 
must be a new faith, “to formulate that new technique, 


27 



CHALLENGE OF MODERN CRITICISM 


to build up the program for the conservation of our 
spiritual resources is the task of American criticism.” 
The fiddles were tuning. What would they play? 


X 


28 



m&Fvtm 


TWO 

MR. MENCKEN DOES HIS BIT 

H ENRY LOUIS MENCKEN is like Edgar Allan 
Poe, Beelzebub, and George Bernard Shaw. None 
of these comparisons would offend him. He is like Edgar 
Allan Poe because he uses much the same critical methods 
that Poe used, and because they look at their fellow men 
with the same lack of respect. He is like Beelzebub 
because his challenge to America is the same challenge 
that the archfiend flung to his fallen comrades as they 
simmered in the lake of fire: “Awake! Arise! Or be 
forever fallen!” He is like George Bernard Shaw because 
he is the only American that can match Mr. Shaw’s 
impudence. 

Of the three, he is most like Edgar Allan Poe. They 
are alike in method and point of view, but different in 
period and in personality. Their differences are due 
largely to the times in which they lived. Poe is a good 
example of the man without the moment. The period 
in which he lived was ready only for personal criticism, 


29 







CHALLENGE OF MODERN CRITICISM 


so that he spent the talents of a keen mind on reviews of 
little books. In his day there was no place for criticism 
that dealt with ideas. There were few ideas active among 
the public; there were only beliefs and plans. Ideas are 
the result of excess energy, and Poe’s contemporaries were 
too busy raising cotton and tobacco, moving to the west, 
and building railroads to formulate general theories about 
life. Moreover, there had been no general criticism before 
Poe to prepare the way for him, as there has been for 
Mr. Mencken. He was a lone voice crying in a wilder¬ 
ness where there was no one to listen. 

Mr. Mencken came at the right moment. As we have 
seen, Mr. Macy had prepared the way for American 
criticism, and Mr. Brooks had issued the call for debate. 
That call Mr. Mencken sprang belligerently to answer. 
His period was ready for him. Since the Spanish- 
American War Americans had been doing more thinking 
than they had ever done before. They were responsive 
to general ideas. The west was settled; big business was 
pretty well settled as well. The main adventures left were 
intellectual ones. Life was fairly easy those fifteen 
prosperous years before the World War; men had time 
and energy to think abstractly. And as soon as they 
began to think, they began to question: Was this the 
best of all possible worlds? Was democracy a success? 


30 



MR. MENCKEN DOES HIS BIT 


Was having your pastor call you Bill at Rotary meeting 
better than being president of the United States? Did 
Washington cut down the cherry tree? And Mr. 
Mencken knew all the answers. Not only that, but he 
found many more questions that no one had yet discovered 
and asked them. He asked: Why do Americans elect 
stupid nobodies to all the public offices? Are there any 
people in the world so credulous, so silly, so lacking in 
any appreciation of the finer things of life as the 
Americans? Why do Americans refuse to look at good 
literature and read imbecilic twaddle instead? All these 
and many more he asked. Where Poe had to stick to 
writing about books, Mr. Mencken can wax as voluble 
as he pleases about Puritanism in America, the function 
of criticism, or the cult of hope, and be sure of a reading 
followed by much discussion. He is the Bad Boy of 
American criticism. He taunts, he flouts every tradition, 
he throws stones at all the idols, he hisses all the heroes. 
Nothing is sacred to him; the world is full of charlatans 
says he, and he is ordained by himself to expose them all. 

It is in consequence of this contrast of periods that the 
two men are variously different. Mencken is a success; 
Poe was a failure. Poe was often in want; Mencken lives 
in the comfort brought with the money that rolls in when 
he flouts at his countrymen. Poe dreamed for years of 


31 



CHALLENGE OF MODERN CRITICISM 


editing a national journal of his own, in which he could 
discuss life and literature unhampered by an editorial 
overlord. He died with his ambition unfulfilled. Mencken 
dreamed the same dream, and has seen it come true in 
the American Mercury . Poe toiled and fought and was 
disregarded by a generation that was not ready for him; 
Mencken has jeered and scoffed and has been taken to 
the bosom of a generation that was prepared for his 
coming. 

Their lives are different. They have both lived in 
Baltimore, and they both have written for newspapers 
and magazines, but there the similiarities end. Mr. 
Mencken was born in Baltimore in 1880, thirty-one years 
after Poe died there. He was educated—a phrase he 
would object to—at Knall’s Institute, a private elementary 
school, and at Baltimore Polytechnic, a high school. He 
was graduated at sixteen and worked for three years in 
his father’s tobacco factory. In 1899, after his father’s 
death, he became a reporter on the Baltimore Morning 
Herald. From that time on his rise was as rapid as that 
of an Alger hero. He was city editor at twenty-three, 
managing editor at twenty-five, and editor-in-chief two 
years later. Then he joined the staff of the Baltimore 
Sun, and was sent to Europe as a war correspondent. 
In 1914 he returned and became joint editor of the Smart 


32 



MR. MENCKEN DOES HIS BIT 


Set, and helped to drag that magazine out of the abyss 
into which it had fallen. In 1924 he and George Jean 
Nathan started the American Mercury. They were joint 
owners for six years. In 1930, Mencken became sole owner 
and editor. He still lives in Baltimore, where he is, 
contrary to all suspicions, an honest and upright citizen, 
and a pleasant person to have around the house. 

The bulk of his work is enormous. His first book 
and only volume of verse, was published in 1903. Since 
then he has published some twenty volumes of prose, 
most of them criticism. He has written five books in 
collaboration with other men, and articles of his have 
been published in numerous collections. He has tried 
verse, short story, novel, drama, every form of journalistic 
writing, and every branch of criticism and review. In 
all, he has written and published over eight million words. 

But Mr. Mencken is like Poe in his methods of 
criticism. They are both swashbucklers. They love to 
slash and thrust and strut about the stage. They are 
the villains of the piece, and they like themselves in that 
role. Poe was limited to attacking literary pretense, 
Mencken declares war on all manner of counterfeit, be 
it in music, art, morals, or politics. They love to expose 
quackery, at the same time being a bit of quacks themselves. 
Mr. Mencken wrote an article On Being an American 


33 



CHALLENGE OF MODERN CRITICISM 


that, if anyone took it seriously, would put him outside 
the pale of decent men. But he wrote it, as Poe wrote 
much of his most scathing remarks, with tongue in cheek. 
Poe was forced to perform before empty seats much of 
the time; Mencken’s houses are packed, and he sends his 
audiences away sometimes angry, sometimes disgusted, 
sometimes amused, but never indifferent. 

They both are gifted in abuse. If the following passages 
from their criticisms of books were placed side by side 
with no indication of authorship, it would take a sophisti¬ 
cated student to determine which was Poe’s and which 
was Mr. Mencken’s. 

Said Poe of Headley’s Sacred Mountain: 

“The book is written in the kind of phraseology in 
which John Philpot Curran when drunk, would have made 
a speech at a public dinner . . . Let us endeavor, how¬ 
ever, to give some general idea of the work. ‘The design’ 
says the author in his preface, ‘is to render more familiar 
and lifelike, some of the scenes of the Bible.’ Here in 
the very first sentence of his preface, we suspect the 
Reverend Mr. Headley of fibbing; for his design as it 
appears to ordinary apprehension, is merely that of making 
a little money by selling a little book.” 

Of Rufus Dawes’s long poem Geraldine he wrote: 

“The lover brings forth a miniature . . . sinks it in 
the bosom of the lady, cuts his finger, and writes with 


34 



MR. MENCKEN DOES HIS BIT 


the blood an epistle, (where is not specified, but we 
presume he indites it upon the bosom as it is ‘close beside* 
the picture) in which epistle he announces he is ‘another 
woman’s victim,’ giving us to understand that he himself 
is a woman after all, and concluding with the delicious 
bit of Billingsgate— 

'dare I tell? 

’Tis Alice! Curse me Geraldine! Farewell / 

The whole passage, perhaps, would have read better thus— 

‘Oh, my eye! 

’Tis Alice! D—n it, Geraldine, good bye! ” 

He called Cornelius Mathews a “turkey gobbler,” 
declared that Lewis Gaylord Clark was “as smooth as oil, 
or a sermon from Dr. Hawks,” and described C. P. 
Cranch as “one of the least intolerable of the school of 
Boston transcendentalists.” Quite in the fashion of Mr. 
Mencken, he used Hawthorne as a cue for falling foul 
of public opinion: “The author of Twice Told Tales is 
scarcely recognized by the press or the public, and when 
noticed at all, it is merely to be damned by faint praise.” 

Now move on to Mr. Mencken and see how slight is 
the change of method: 

In William Allen White’s “very first book of fiction, 
there was a flavor of chewing-gum and marshmallows.” 
Vachel Lindsay, “Alas ... has done his own 
burlesque.” “What ails Hamlin Garland is a vision of 


35 



CHALLENGE OF MODERN CRITICISM 


beauty, a seductive strain of bawdy music over the hills. 
But he has no more feeling for the intrinsic dignity of 
beauty . . . than a policeman.” 

Of Mary MacLane , a shocker of the ’90’s, he says: 

“What I mean is simply this; that the secret of Mary 
MacLane is simply this: that the origin of all her inchoate 
naughtiness is simply this: that she is a Puritan who has 
heard the call of joy and is struggling against it 
damnably.” 

He hits off his American public in his turn anent of 
the Rotarians: 

“What these fellows say is almost always nonsense, but 
it is at least the sort of nonsense that the American people 
yearn to cherish and believe in—it somehow fills their 
need.” 

And in his Catechism : 

Q. If you find so much that is unworthy of reverence 
in the United States, why then do you live here? 

A. Why do men go to zoos? 

Mr. Mencken is like Poe in his point of view. He 
despises the mob; he, like Poe, feels that he is an intellectual 
aristocrat. But where Poe’s contempt was heightened by 
his feeling that he was not recognized, Mr. Mencken is 
happier in knowing that he has had both recognition and 
reward. He is contemptuous, but not resentful. Poe 


36 



MR. MENCKEN DOES HIS BIT 


was bitter in his isolation, the result of being a man bom 
before his time. His home was poor and full of anxiety; 
he was always in trouble of one sort or another; he 
estranged his best friends; he lacked the ability to work 
long and hard at an uncongenial task. He quarrelled 
with his employers because he felt that they were his 
intellectual inferiors, as no doubt they were. He died at 
forty, just as life seemed to hold out new hope to him. 
If Mr. Mencken had died at forty there would never have 
been an American Mercury , nor any of the post-World- 
War writing. Mr. Mencken has a balance in his life 
that Poe did not enjoy. He has a quiet, pleasant home, 
where of late years he does all of his writing; he has the 
rich resources of music, friends, and money. He is 
probably happier than Poe ever was; he is certainly vastly 
more comfortable. 

Poe was preoccupied with detail effects. He used his 
criticism of Hawthorne as an excuse for the long article 
on the technique of composition, which is often printed 
separately. He has analyzed his “The Raven” to explain 
exactly how it was done. How a story or a poem was 
written was often of more importance to him than what 
it said. He objected to Dickens on the score of the 
formlessness of his novels. He fought for Hawthorne 
partly as a means for showing his contempt for the world 


37 



CHALLENGE OF MODERN CRITICISM 


which did not recognize genius, and partly because he 
enjoyed the perfect style of the “rebellious Puritan.” 

Mr. Mencken is given to more general ideas. What 
a man has to say is more important to him than his manner 
of saying it. He has long used Theodore Dreiser as 
Poe used Hawthorne, to point out the stupidity of a 
world that refuses to recognize genius. Not that he does 
not recognize Mr. Dreiser’s faults. He sees the lack of 
a sense of humor, the tediousness of the piling up of 
details quite irrelevant to the story, the sledge-hammer 
method of getting effects, but he sees through these the 
genius portraying the infinite sadness of human life. A 
glance at a few titles of essays will show his interest in 
ideas rather than books, or in the manner of writing 
books: Scientific Examination of a Popular Virtue, 
Advice to Young Men, in Defence of Women, The 
Curse of Civilization. 

Poe was always handicapped in his criticism by the 
fixed idea that he was a southern gentleman. Because of 
that he could never write an uncomplimentary review of 
a book by a woman. Since his period was one in which 
a great many ladies relieved their hidden emotions by 
writing bad poetry, he has written many laudatory re¬ 
views of long forgotten poems. Mr. Mencken has suf¬ 
fered no such restraint. In his little book In Defence 


38 



MR. MENCKEN DOES HIS BIT 


of Women he clothes the most unchivalrous views of the 
sex in such suave language as to make them sound 
almost polite. 

It is interesting to see what Mr. Mencken thinks of 
Poe. He says in the essay on James Huneker: “Edgar 
Allan Poe, I am fond of believing, earned as a critic 
a good deal of the excess of praise that he gets as a 
romancer and a poet.” And again in the same essay: 
“As for Poe, though he was by nature a far more original 
and penetrating critic than either Emerson or Lowell, he 
was enormously ignorant of good books, and moreover, 
he could never quite throw off a congenital vulgarity of 
taste, so painfully visible in the struttings of his style.” 
No one would ever accuse Mr. Mencken himself of being 
“enormously ignorant of good books,” but there are 
many who have already and often said that he “could 
never quite throw off a congenital vulgarity of taste, so 
painfully visible in the strutting of his style.” They are 
alike, then, in their ideas and their methods; they are 
different in the period in which they had to work, and in 
the worldly treatment of their efforts. 

Beelzebub and his angels fell for nine days and nine 
nights. At the end of that time they awoke in an un¬ 
comfortable spot. The leader was the first to take stock 
of the place to which they had descended. Then he made 


39 



CHALLENGE OF MODERN CRITICISM 


his famous cry: “Awake! Arise! Or be forever fallen!” 
Mr. Mencken does the same thing; he has sounded the 
alarm to his fellow citizens of “these Benighted States.” 
He is stirring them up as Beelzebub did his cohorts. He 
has elected himself official attention-caller for America. 
He has done just what Mr. Brooks called for—stimulated 
protest, stirred up emotion and abuse, if not intellectual 
effort. At the least he has aroused some vitality, if not 
real thinking. For years the undergraduate has wor¬ 
shipped at his shrine. The result has been that the public 
has made some mental effort, and has learned to be re¬ 
spectful to critical thinking. 

Like Beelzebub, Mr. Mencken pretends utter detach¬ 
ment from the crowd. He is in America, but not of it. 
He believes none of the things that others believe. He 
is against Puritanism, professors, Rotarians, education, 
prohibition, comstockery, and any number of other 
things. He is mostly against the people who are against 
something. He seldom takes a stand for anything. He 
is for liberty in all its phases, Theodore Dreiser, and 
cleanliness. He says himself that his motives are not to 
be respected. He and Mark Twain are the two real 
American pessimists. He never follows up an argument; 
he has no respect for consistency in criticism. Like Emer¬ 
son he says: “I do not pretend to know what truth is. 


40 



MR. MENCKEN DOES HIS BIT 


I can only present it as it seems to me today. Tomorrow 
it may seem like something else.” 

He is against Puritanism because it seems to him to 
have taken the joy out of American life and literature, 
and to have put in its place only notions of what is 
proper and nice. Rotarians seem to him merely stupid, 
with their talk of service. He has much of Emerson’s 
feeling for self-reliance, without ever talking much about 
it. He has a theory that no person can educate another, 
that beyond the barest essentials education must be won 
by the individual. He never went to college, so that people 
are tempted to explain his feeling against professors and 
education as in the nature of rationalization, a sort of 
sour-graping. They forget his impressive and scholarly 
big book on The American Language. Prohibition 
and comstockery are to him merely a curtailing of indi¬ 
vidual liberty. He is against all laws that curb freedom 
of speech. He has always disagreed with the public, but, 
except for certain rather bad-boyish utterances about him¬ 
self, he has never said a thing that he did not at the 
time feel to be true. 

A collection of the writings of E. W. Howe, publisher 
of Howe's Monthly and author of The Story of a 
Country Town, was made a few years ago and published 
in London under the title, Ventures Into Common 


41 



CHALLENGE OF MODERN CRITICISM 


Sense . Mr. Mencken wrote a lengthy preface to the 
book in which he states some of his own theories and 
shows his high approval of the ideas of Mr. Howe. He 
summarizes his feeling about Puritanism as follows: 

“Our Puritan culture, as everyone knows, makes for 
many laudable virtues: enterprise, industry, philoprogen¬ 
itiveness, patriotism, the fear of God, a great appetite for 
brummagen ideals, a high desire to be righteous, a noble 
gratitude for the fact that we are not as other men are. 
But one of the things it does not make for is that austere 
passion which exalts a bald fact above comfort, security 
and the revelation of God—one of the things it does not 
promote is common truthfulness. The American, indeed, 
always views the truth a bit suspiciously ... he seems 
convinced that it is dangerous, and perhaps downright 
indecent.” 

He goes on to say that Americans practice everything 
that they preach against, that they vilify big business and 
get into it as fast as they can, that they shout for liberty 
and submit to laws that invade and destroy their most 
sacred rights, that they profess a personal virtue of the 
highest nobility and have a crime rate higher than any 
other civilized country. He thinks the reason for all this 
is that America is burdened with a code of morals in¬ 
herited from the Puritans which no healthy race could 
observe and survive. He suggests as a remedy that we 


42 




MR. MENCKEN DOES HIS BIT 


throw away the old outworn code and form a new one 
that will fit the facts of civilization in America. But then 
he argues that Americans are too timorous to do any¬ 
thing of the sort. He boils down Mr. Howe’s philosophy 
of life into seven plain propositions: 1, the only real 
human motive is intelligent self-interest; altruism is not 
only bogus, but impossible; 2, it is virtuous to get money 
because money makes it possible to survive; 3, a man who 
gets money is a better citizen than one who doesn’t; 4, the 
aim of all reformers is to get something for themselves, 
when they pretend that it isn’t they lie; 5, any American 
can get money enough to make himself comfortable, bar¬ 
ring acts of God; 6, any man who fails to get money 
enough to be comfortable shows an unfitness to survive 
and deserves to be exploited by his betters; 7, the people 
have a remedy for all public abuses in their own hands. If 
they fail to get relief, then the blame lies wholly upon their 
own credulity, emotionalism and imbecility. To all of 
these propositions Mr. Mencken gives his hearty support. 

He has a theory about the function of the critic. He 
is the agent that produces a reaction between a piece of 
literature and the public. Out of the meeting of the work 
of art and the spectator come understanding, appreci¬ 
ation, and intelligent enjoyment, which is what the artist 
tried to produce. 


43 



CHALLENGE OF MODERN CRITICISM 


In chemistry a catalytic agent is a substance that will 
have such an effect on two other materials. It does not 
enter into the reaction between them, but it does in some 
manner cause them to unite. Mr. Mencken feels that he 
is the catalytic agent for the books he has reviewed and 
and the authors he has introduced to the public. But he 
is also a catalytic agent in life. He has brought together 
the public and ideas. He himself has, he thinks, not 
entered into the reaction, but the public has come to have 
some understanding and appreciation of new ideas. 

Mr. Mencken has brought about a general precipitation 
of protest, and the protest has led to discussion—the dis¬ 
cussion so badly needed in America. He has attacked all 
the things that America holds most sacred, the law, the 
home, the school, the church. Nothing has been safe 
from him. And he cannot be dismissed as a troublemaker 
talking to hear the sound of his own voice. He has always 
enough truth in his utterances to sting, particularly since 
others have been seeing that America was not all that it 
should be. Because he attacked the old tradition he has 
led others to defend it, and still others to suggest sub¬ 
stitutes. He does not offer any solutions for the conditions 
that he sees all about. He merely points them out. Per¬ 
haps he has, after all, a faith that America has not lost 
its old courage and pioneering spirit so completely that 


44 



MR. MENCKEN DOES HIS BIT 


it cannot be aroused to remedy matters once the disease 
is pointed out. 

He is like George Bernard Shaw in only one phase, his 
impudence, and his success in startling people by means 
of it. One reads his work with the feeling that he is 
writing with his tongue in his cheek when he seems most 
serious. 

The questions arise: Why should he take all this 
trouble to point out to America her faults and her stu¬ 
pidities? Why does he concern himself with a nation 
that lacks any appreciation of truth and beauty? Why 
does he put on the guise of an evil buffoon, when he is a 
kindly, gracious gentleman? He works enormously. He 
has gone all over the world from Aristotle down. He 
reads a dozen books in order to do justice to a review 
of one. He might have aligned himself on the side of 
the dispensers of sweetness and light and made millions 
of dollars where he has made thousands, but he chose 
the path of calumny instead. Why? 

The answer probably is that by so doing he hopes to 
change things for the better. By pointing out the stupid¬ 
ities of his fellows he hopes to get them to discuss the 
matter, and perhaps be less stupid. By ridiculing lack of 
interest in beautiful things, he hopes to arouse concern for 
them. By violently attacking injustice he hopes to stimu- 


45 



CHALLENGE OF MODERN CRITICISM 


late thinking about justice. He is an incipient Puritan 
who has felt the call to duty and is trying his best to deny 
it. He wants to be—and from his own point of view this 
is the meanest thing that anyone could say about him— 
of service to the community. 




46 







THREE 

STUART P. SHERMAN 

AND THE DEFENCE OF TRADITION 

A PERENNIAL question is raised all through life 
by the conflict between the law of change and the 
desire for authority. Life is always changing and men 
always want permanence. The sociologists call the forces 
the desire for stability and the desire for new experience. 
Probably it is mental and emotional laziness that makes 
people want to have life settled, but it is true that the 
clinging to old things, old homes, old friends, old cus¬ 
toms, old traditions, is largely because they represent 
fixity. Even Edna St. Vincent Millay, poet laureate in 
her time for the generation that was pleading for release 
from all old standards and traditions, wrote: 

“The lore that stood a moment in your eyes, 

The words that lay a moment on your tongue, 

Are one with all that in a moment dies, 

A little under-said and orer-sung. 

But l shall find the sullen rocks and skies 
Unchanged from what they were when I was young.” 

47 











CHALLENGE OF MODERN CRITICISM 


Even youth longs for permanence, at least of emotions. 
Yet all progress, all evolution of any kind comes through 
the possibility of alteration in life and thought. There 
are those philosophers who see no advance in the changes 
in civilization, but most persons cling to the belief in 
progress. For more than two centuries in America the 
Puritan tradition was the response to the desire for author¬ 
ity. It made no attempt to answer the law of change; it 
insisted that human nature and the moral law did not 
change. 

The tradition held that the permanent things were 
beauty, truth and goodness. The assault on tradition 
attacked the conventional ideas of all three. In the field of 
the arts the questions were asked: What conventions are 
settled? How far may one experiment? For a long 
time Aristotle was the final authority on beauty in the 
world of fine art, and questions concerning beauty were 
decided by going to him. Then the pragmatists evolved 
the idea that a thing was good if it produced the de¬ 
sired effect. One did not ask if a picture, or a poem, 
or a piece of music was orthodoxly beautiful or not, he 
asked what the artist had tried to do, and if he had 
accomplished his purpose. Experimenters said that there 
should be no ruling conventions, and became very 
wrathful when critics tried to judge their work by con- 


48 



STUART P. SHERMAN 


ventional standards. Artists painted pictures without 
form or perspective; musicians wrote songs without mel¬ 
ody; poets made poems without rime or rhythm; novel¬ 
ists wrote stories in styles unintelligible to persons who 
were not in the secret of how they were written. 

In the field of learning the assault was on the tradition 
of truth. The young critics asked: Is there any ultimate 
truth? Is any tradition safe from new truth? Does not 
truth grow and change just as human beings grow and 
change? Humanity has often thought that it has reached 
ultimate truth, that there was nothing more to be learned. 
The final truth at one time was that the earth was flat; 
anyone who believed the contrary was laughed at, if 
not persecuted. Most people fully expected Columbus 
to fall over the edge and be lost forever. Copernicus found 
that the sun was the center about which all the planets 
moved, but he did not dare publish his knowledge until 
he was dying, for the accepted truth of his day was that 
the earth was the universal center. Christian ministers 
of the early days of Puritanism were sure that they could 
tell definitely if a man’s soul was saved or not. Scholars 
all through the ages have been sure that they have ar¬ 
rived at the final borders of truth, only to have the next 
generations disprove their discoveries. 

Truths go in and out of fashion. They go in cycles, 


49 



CHALLENGE OF MODERN CRITICISM 


like women’s fashions. Robert Frost wrote in his poem 
The Black Cottage: 

“. . . why abandon a belief 

Merely because it ceases to be true? 

Cling to it long enough, and not a doubt 
It will turn again, for so it goes. 

Most of the change we think we see in life 
Is due to truths being in and out of favor” 

Perhaps there are no new truths; it may be that men 
merely become aware of a truth that they did not know 
about before, and then they proclaim it as new. Science 
discovers new laws every day, but the laws are not new. 
They were there all the time; it is just that the scientist 
succeeded in discovering one that he had not known 
about before. Evolution had been going on eons before 
Darwin. The law of gravitation had been acting for 
millions of years before the apple fell on Newton’s head, 
and objects immersed in water were buoyed up by a force 
equal to the weight of water they displaced ever since 
there were water and objects to be immersed. 

The defenders of tradition repeat: Is there no ultimate 
truth? Is there no firm platform upon which men can 
take their stand? Is the wish for permanence in the 
human heart a perverted desire? Is there no tradition 
that is safe from new truth? James Russell Lowell an- 


50 



STUART P. SHERMAN 


swered the questions many years ago, before the current 
discussion had arisen: 

“Nothing that keeps thought out is safe from thought. 
For there’s no virgin-fort but self-respect, 

And truth defensive hath last hold on God.” 

And Emerson at about the same time was saying: 

“No truth so sublime but it may be trivial tomorrow in 
the light of new thoughts. People wish to be settled; 
only so far as they are unsettled is there any hope for 
them.” 

In the field of conduct the assault on tradition is on 
goodness—on individual and social ethics. The critic 
asks if any social institutions are fixed, if the ideals of 
the state, the church, the school, the market, the family, 
are permanent. And he finds sufficient proof that they 
are not. Modern Russia is making a vast experiment 
in doing without the traditional ideals of church and 
family. Modern living conditions in America are tak¬ 
ing away from the family its traditional influence as 
the center of social and religious life; while divorce, 
frowned upon by church and society a few years ago, 
has become a commonplace. The critic finds that patriot¬ 
ism is a military matter to most people, to be called for 
only in time of war, allied closely to bands playing and 
flags waving. The church is not filling the needs of mod¬ 
em life, sometimes because it cannot find out how to 


51 



CHALLENGE OF MODERN CRITICISM 


meet them, often because it refuses to see that the needs 
of modern life are different from the needs of fifty years 
ago. The church is very apt to say: We have hold on the 
eternal things, the things that do not change; therefore 
we need not alter our way of meeting human problems. 

But the critic finds that the field of social conduct, the 
market, and the family must not be talked about in con¬ 
servative circles. The changes that have come over them 
must not be recognized. Codes are to be accepted; one 
must not have ideas about them. If one questions the 
changes in the church he is an agnostic or atheist; if he dis¬ 
cusses the state or the market he is an anarchist; if he points 
out the changes in the family he is a bolshevist. All of 
these charges have been hurled at Mr. Mencken time 
and time again. 

For the individual the attack is on morality. The 
critic of the old tradition asks: What is morality? Are 
morals derived from experience or are they imposed by 
a standard outside one’s self? Can morality ever be set- 
ded? Must it not take into account the changes in so¬ 
ciety? Then he probably points out that in some so¬ 
cieties the having of three wives is not only nice, but 
necessary and highly moral, that in others a bare body 
covered with tattooed green and yellow and red scrolls is 
the height of beauty, and that in still another the highest 
52 



STUART P. SHERMAN 


truth may be that a yearly trip to Mecca is most accept¬ 
able unto the Lord. 

The challenge came to authority. It was called upon 
to defend itself from the attacks of those who advocated 
change. Mr. Mencken questioned all the canons of 
beauty, truth and goodness as accepted by authority. In 
his train came Joel Elias Spingam, Burton Rascoe, Ernest 
Boyd, Hartley Grattan and others. It was the task of 
the traditionalists to find a champion to meet with them 
in the lists of criticism. 

In any debate the onlookers must discriminate be¬ 
tween what is rooted in conviction and what is rooted 
in prejudice. Too much argument is vituperative; the 
contestants spend more time throwing mud balls at their 
opponents than they do explaining their own position. 
And it is always the conservatives who get the most ex¬ 
cited and throw the blackest balls. That is probably 
because conservatism is a defensive attitude. The at¬ 
tackers have the whole world to rove about in, while the 
defenders must stay at home and wait for some one to 
come to them with ideas that they may oppose. 

All debaters are moved by a discontent with American 
life. The conservatives are dissatisfied because it has 
fallen from the ways of their fathers; the liberals are out 
of patience because they do not like the places into which 

53 



CHALLENGE OF MODERN CRITICISM 


it has fallen. The conservatives advocate more deference 
to authority and to standards of right living and a closer 
holding to tradition; the liberals want more freedom, 
more chance to work out their own salvation, more liberty 
for experiment. Both sides see that there is room for 
improvement, but they disagree as to how the betterment 
shall be brought about. Mr. Mencken and his forces 
would tear down all the old traditions, cast Puritanism 
completely away, get rid of outworn morals, discover 
fresh truth and beauty to fit a changing world. 

To answer him and his kind, the school of culture 
and authority raised up a champion, who for many 
years was to fight their battles before the world. Van 
Wyck Brooks and John Macy had prepared the moment 
for Mr. Mencken. By his assault on tradition he had 
prepared the way for the defender of tradition. This 
defender was Stuart Pratt Sherman, a vivid personality, 
a fighter who fought a good fight, a dramatic critic of 
life and literature. 

Stuart Pratt Sherman was born in Iowa in 1881. His 
parents were New Englanders, so that he went to Williams 
College, where he took his A.B. degree in 1903. In 1906 
he was given a Doctor of Philosophy degree from Har¬ 
vard. After some years as professor of English at North¬ 
western University at Evanston, Illinois, he went in 1911 


54 



STUART P. SHERMAN 


to the University of Illinois, where he was first pro¬ 
fessor and then head of the department of English. In 
1924 he left Illinois to go to New York as literary editor 
of the New York Herald Tribune . His death in 1928 
made a large gap in the ranks of the American critics of 
this generation. 

Mr. Sherman was for many years the spokesman for 
the school of culture and tradition. He w was for close 
adherence to standards rather than freedom, for decorum 
against license, for culture versus nature. In his defence 
of tradition he was a Puritan coming back to his heritage. 
In 1923 he was elected to the American Academy of 
Arts and Letters to fill the place left vacant by the death 
of Thomas Nelson Page. He was proposed by W. C. 
Brownell and Paul Elmer More, and at the time of his 
election was the youngest member of that august body. 
If any proof of Mr. Sherman’s original conservatism 
were needed, election to the Academy would supply it, 
for no critic but a tried and true follower of the tradition 
ever enters the portals of the edifice. But his election is 
especially interesting in view of the fact that he was al¬ 
ready in 1923 turning away from the paths of tradition. 

A paragraph from Mr. Sherman’s essay on Shakespeare 
states his early creed clearly and simply. 

“The philosophical mind of Shakespeare’s age began 

55 



CHALLENGE OF MODERN CRITICISM 


the work of reflection by cleaving the universe along three 
levels. On the lowest level is the natural world, which 
is the plane of instinct, appetite, animality, lust, the animal 
passions of affections; on this level the regulation is by 
necessary or natural law. On the middle level is the 
human world, which is regulated and, in a sense, created 
by the will and knowledge of man; working upon the 
natural world; but governed by reason, the special human 
faculty; and illumined more or less from the level above. 
On the third level is the supernatural world, which is the 
plane of spiritual beings, and the home of eternal ideas.” 

He believed that the critic should have arrived at some 
philosophy of life, that he should know what he believes 
in, be able to explain why, and wish to be convincing in 
his explanation. He maintained that the finest product 
of civilization is a highly cultivated gentleman capable 
of playing a fine role with fine consistency. But this 
means that a critic must be a man who has enough of the 
culture that he criticises to have, not only discrimination 
and conviction, but also fairness and courtesy. Often 
Mr. Sherman himself had neither, when engrossed in an 
argument. He was a good hater. He fought a running 
battle with Mr. Mencken; neither one could pass the 
other without shouting an insult. When Mr. Mencken 
said “lascivious” and Mr. Sherman sneered “the young, 
the innocent, the inexperienced” the reader is reminded 


56 



STUART P. SHERMAN 


not of two gentlemen of letters defending abstract causes, 
but of schoolboys in a vacant lot stirring up wrath and 
getting their own courage up for the fray. 

Mr. Mencken had been fighting Puritanism from the 
beginning of his literary career; now came Mr. Sherman 
to take up the cudgels for it. The enemies of Puritanism 
said that it was too conservative, the enemy of progress; 
Mr. Sherman pointed out that Puritans had been the 
ultra-liberals through all their history. In every country 
where they have arisen they have been the opponents of 
the established order. In England they rose against the 
established order and took off the king’s head. “Was 
this,” asked Mr. Sherman, “a stand-patting for old forms, 
a defence of hidebound tradition?” They made the first 
break since 1066 in the line of English kings and main¬ 
tained that break for eleven years; they attacked the 
church; they were active enough in their insurgency to 
leave the country that was their home and go across the 
unknown seas to found a home in a wilderness. They 
were the courageous dissenters of the days of Charles II 
and after. They were, said Mr. Sherman, the people 
responsible for most of the change and development in 
America. 

The essential features of the eternal Puritans are, ac¬ 
cording to Mr. Sherman, dissatisfaction with the past, 

57 



CHALLENGE OF MODERN CRITICISM 


courage to break sharply with it, readiness to accept 
discipline in order to attain a nobler life, and a serious 
desire to make the better life prevail. He tries to free 
the Puritan from the exclusive association with the man¬ 
ners and morals of any given historical period. The 
modern idea of a Puritan is drawn largely from the cari¬ 
catures made of him in the writings of men like Samuel 
Butler and John Dryden. These men were trying to 
please a king who had lost a father and a throne because 
of the Puritans, so that writings that put them in unfavor¬ 
able lights were no doubt pleasing to him. But Puritanism 
is not a fixed form of life, but rather an exploring and 
creative spirit, with an immense passion for improvement, 
and an equally great ability for self-discipline. 

He traced the Puritan in history to show that Aristotle 
recognized the element in man when he said that the desire 
for perfection was a fundamental human desire. Jesus 
was a Puritan in relation to the corrupt Jewish tradition; 
Socrates, Plato, Confucius, Buddha, all were Puritans, 
because they saw that to attain the better life a man must 
submit to self-denial and suppress some impulses in order 
to liberate others. Of Americans he used Benjamin 
Franklin and Emerson as examples of Puritans. 

Besides its insurgency Mr. Sherman defended Puri¬ 
tanism on the grounds of its integrity, its sincerity. The 


S3 



STUART P. SHERMAN 


Puritans have never had any desire but to lead lives of 
self-control, of moral purpose, of “harmonious perfection 
of body and soul.” He believed firmly that a Puritan 
democracy was the only kind that we have any reason 
to suppose will endure. Despite the critics who were 
crying aloud that Puritanism was the force that was stunt¬ 
ing all that was free and joyful and lovely in America he 
said: “ . . . The Puritan is profoundly in sympathy 
with the modern spirit, is indeed the formative force in 
the modern spirit.” He believed that the Puritans had 
supplied the self-control, the moral honesty, the strength, 
that gave the backbone to American character. In a 
nation that has spread itself from coast to coast in less 
than a century, that has had to absorb millions of immi¬ 
grants from every race in the world, Puritanism has stood 
as the solid rock in a welter of change. In England the 
royal family, which still refuses to recognize divorce, gives 
a permanent standard of morals. In France a national 
church supplies the moral standard. America had neither 
king nor church; she had only Puritanism, which for two 
hundred years upheld the old traditions of restraint and 
self-control and decorous ways of life. 

However, Mr. Sherman saw as well as another the dis¬ 
advantages of a Puritanism gone-to-seed, that wants to 
impose narrow ideas of morality on others. He deplored 


59 



CHALLENGE OF MODERN CRITICISM 


alike the spirit that would pass so-called Blue Laws to 
force conformity to another’s standards of right and 
wrong, and the spinsterish primness that objects to such 
manifestations of the times as a one-piece bathing suit. 
He did not think that such traits were the essence of 
Puritanism, even though they roused the most enmity. 

Because he believed in the dignity of human life he was 
an opponent of the naturalists, who thought that man 
was merely an animal swayed by brute impulses, whose ac¬ 
tions could be accounted for by the laws of chemical 
affinity. As a consequence he had nothing good to say 
about the work of Theodore Dreiser, and it was at this 
point that he met Mr. Mencken in closest combat. 

He attacked the theory that Mr. Dreiser was giving an 
unbiased, a photographic reproduction of life. He con¬ 
tended that it was impossible to write about life without 
selecting certain details to record. The choosing of 
details, the arranging and recording them, cannot be done 
without some theory about life. Mr. Dreiser claimed 
that he had none, that he merely put down what he saw. 
Each generation seeks to tell the truth, John Bunyan no 
less than Mr. Dreiser. The difference is in the thing that 
each generation takes for truth. And out of his five 
novels—Mr. Sherman had not read The American 
Tragedy —he formulated Mr. Dreiser’s theory of life: 


60 



STUART P. SHERMAN 


That man was an animal amenable to no law but the law 
of his own temperament; that society is a jungle in which 
the struggle for existence continues and must continue, on 
terms unaltered by legal, moral or social conventions; 
that men are greedy, quarrelsome, sensual; that women 
are vain, soft, pleasure-seeking, and easy prey for any 
man. This philosophy, said Mr. Sherman, forever ex¬ 
cluded Mr. Dreiser from the field of character in which 
a great novelist must work. 

In Mr. Sherman, Mr. Mencken found a foeman worthy 
of his steel. Mr. Sherman could get just as vituperative 
as his enemy could, and he had a fine scholarship to back 
up his cause. His journalistic power was very nearly 
as great. He exposed the lack of variety in Mr. Dreiser’s 
method, the poverty of his ideas, and the unreality of 
the actions of some of his characters. Some of his passages 
sound like Mr. Mencken at his most scathing. 

“In The Financier he ‘documents’ these truths about 
Cowperwood in seventy-four chapters, in each of which 
he shows us how his hero made money or how he capti¬ 
vated women in Philadelphia. Not satisfied with the 
demonstration, he returns to the same thesis in The Titan , 
and shows us in sixty-two chapters how the same hero 
made money and captivated women in Chicago and in 
New York. He promises us a third volume, in which 
we shall no doubt learn in a work of sixty or seventy 


61 



CHALLENGE OF MODERN CRITICISM 


chapters—a sort of huge club-sandwich composed of 
slices of business alternating with erotic episodes—how 
Frank Cowperwood made money and captivated women 
in London.” 

He was a defender of tradition, of the tradition of fine 
literature, of orderly living, of love of country. He did 
not think that any man could be a good critic who did 
not have a firm groundwork in the classic writers. Litera¬ 
ture was to him the emancipator of a man from the 
bondage of the present. He was sure that a man would 
find happiness only by controlling his own desires, by 
following “the unwritten laws of God that know no 
change.” Those laws he believed were the laws of denial. 
For many years Paul Elmer More, Irving Babbitt, and 
W. C. Brownell were his greatest present-day literary 
heroes, but he deplored the fact that they were not popular 
with a larger public. He was as apt to faults of temper 
as any ultra-conservative; the violence of his convictions 
often went over into the violence of his prejudices, but 
he prepared the way for the men that he admired most to 
come to the front in American criticism. He supplied the 
other opponent in the debate that Mr. Brooks called for. 

The World War had a deep significance to Mr. Sher¬ 
man. To him it was a fight between the forces of natur¬ 
alism as exemplified by the German army, and the forces 


62 



STUART P. SHERMAN 


of humanity. It proved for him that mankind did up¬ 
hold certain principles of truth and right living, and was 
willing to die for them. He was sure that out of the 
war would come a nation seeking law and order, stability, 
justice, gentleness, and wisdom. He was in favor of 
America going into the war long before she did; he be¬ 
lieved that there was a fine American tradition that 
must be upheld. In an age that rather scoffed at patriot¬ 
ism, as young America did before the World War, he 
cherished it as one of the fine traditions upon which the 
nation had been founded. 

One of the defects of Mr. Sherman’s discernments 
was that to him America was British. He could not see 
that the country had any other mother than England; 
to him America was Britain transplanted to this continent. 
He forgot that this was a hodge-podge of nations. Any 
idea that was un-English was apt to incur his severest 
criticism. It was one of the convictions that oftenest 
spilled over into prejudice, and some of his bitterest hom¬ 
ilies were directed toward the groups of radical thinkers 
whose roots went back to central Europe. 

Another even more serious defect was his bad temper 
with the people who differed with him. He had a ten¬ 
dency toward breaking the rules of fair play in criticism. 
It was his greatest weakness in the humanistic-naturalistic 


63 



CHALLENGE OF MODERN CRITICISM 


controversy—a weakness of which his opponents took 
full advantage. 

When he first went to New York in 1924 he was editor 
of Books . He went over to the literary editorship of the 
Herald Tribune very shortly and a change came over his 
work. It seems to have been an indication of a change 
in the man. As early as 1912 when Mr. More was editor 
of the Nation he had refused an essay of Mr. Sherman’s 
on Rousseau and the Return to Nature . It was a de¬ 
fense of Rousseau against the critics who represented his 
teachings about nature as an attack on civilization and 
society. That was the only article of his that Mr. More 
ever refused while he was with the Nation , but it is in¬ 
dicative of the events that happened twelve years later. 
In the years when Mr. Sherman was at the University of 
Illinois he won the praise of Mr. More and the com¬ 
mendation of Mr. Babbitt, who wrote to him: “The criti¬ 
cal gift you are developing strikes me as just the kind 
that is needed in the country and at the present time. I 
am beginning, however, to look on you as a very dan¬ 
gerous man and am going to do my best to keep on good 
terms with you.” 

Whether it was the change from the scholastic life in 
Champaign or the influence of work on a great metro¬ 
politan daily that caused the change in Mr. Sherman no 


64 



STUART P. SHERMAN 


one knows. From being the chief spokesman for tra¬ 
dition he slid over into a defence of modernism. He 
endured it at first, then enbraced it wholly. In “An 
Imaginary Conversation with Mr. P. E. More,” he wrote 
of the average American: “He would have discovered 
in the average man . . . courage, fortitude, sobriety, 
kindness, honesty, and sound practical intelligence . . . 
he would have learned that the average man is, like him¬ 
self, at heart a mystic ... a lonely pilgrim longing for 
the shadow of a mighty rock in a weary land.” Which 
sounds much like the Reverend Mr. Headley addressing 
a meeting of the Rotary Club at Hunker’s Corners, but 
not at all like the calm scholarliness of a professed dis¬ 
ciple of Paul Elmer More and Irving Babbitt. 

In the columns of the Herald Tribune he came to speak 
indulgently of the modern generation and modern fic¬ 
tion and to compare it with Fielding and Smollett. He 
finally even found it in his heart to defend Mr. Dreiser. 
He had always lamented that Mr. More and Mr. Babbitt 
would take no steps to become more popular with the 
masses; now he turned from them completely. Mr. More 
wrote to him: “I do not like to see a man of your ability 
take up the job of whitewasher.” And again: “Yours 
is a sickly sort of democracy at bottom, and needs a 
doctor.” 


65 



CHALLENGE OF MODERN CRITICISM 


Perhaps if Mr. Sherman had lived to see popular dis¬ 
cussion and opinion swing to humanism, and had seen 
Mr. More and Mr. Babbitt emerge as the leaders of the 
movement he would have returned to the fold. At any 
rate he had done his share in defending tradition; it was 
for others to carry on the war. 



■Sr™ 




FOUR 

AMERICA AND THE OLD WORLD 

I N THE last few years a great many people have tried 
to arrive at general estimates of American life. In¬ 
dividual Americans, either native or foreign, have tried 
to judge the life and culture of the nation; novelists have 
written about America in terms of what they knew about 
Europe; groups of Americans have expressed themselves 
jointly; and foreign interpreters have tried to explain 
how the New World looked to them. These attempts 
to estimate America are significant because they set 
America against broad backgrounds of time and of cur¬ 
rent life in other countries. Some of them deal with the 
nation as a product of the past and some in its relation 
to the present-day world. 

American novelists for many years have been judging 
life in America against the background of foreign civili¬ 
zation. In the 1890’s Howells, Henry James, Edith 
Wharton, and Henry B. Fuller wrote with an extensive 
knowledge of European life and culture. Before them 


67 









CHALLENGE OF MODERN CRITICISM 


had been Irving, Longfellow, Lowell, and Hawthorne, 
all of whom found Europe delightful largely because of 
the contrast between old Europe and new America. The 
reading public before the Civil War was confined largely 
to the Atlantic states, and life there did not offer a great 
contrast to the life of England. But after the war au¬ 
thors like Eggleston, Mark Twain, Harte, Cable, and 
Harris began to use local types and American scenes in 
fiction. The reading public widened and people saw 
that America was something quite different from Europe. 
The books of Howells and James showed the deep-seated 
contrasts between the children of the New World and 
the heirs to the Old World civilization. 

A few persons became prosperous enough to travel 
abroad, and it was in deep contempt of their awestruck 
attitude toward foreign institutions that Mark Twain 
wrote Innocents Abroad . He wanted, he said, “to show 
them how Europe would look to them if they saw it with 
their own eyes instead of the eyes of the people who had 
traveled those countries before them.” As an under¬ 
standing of European civilization the book is of little 
value, but it did arouse an interest in the question of cul¬ 
tural differences. In two of his early books Booth Tark- 
ington did much the same thing. The hero of His Own 
People goes to Europe, makes a fool of himself, and 


68 



AMERICA AND THE OLD WORLD 


comes home disillusioned and ready to claim that the 
courthouse square is more attractive than the Acropolis. 

Howells and James measured American character by 
what they knew of Europe. The results were educational 
to the American who had been brought up to think that 
he was the standard of all things. Mr. James had been 
bred and educated largely in Europe, though when he 
went to England to live he carried with him a good 
knowledge of the best of American civilization. He was 
fond of bringing an American to Europe in his novels 
and watching the interaction of the two cultures. And 
it is not always the American who fails; the hero of his 
novel, The American is the most impressive character 
in the book. Mr. Howells is not so sure of himself. He 
is more the humble pilgrim going to the shrine of culture. 
He has no wish to criticise, but only to admire. His early 
books are nice stories for nice people, particularly nice 
Boston people. When his characters go to Europe, as 
the lady of the Aroostook does, they shock the Europeans 
by a lack of conventions rather than by a deliberate break¬ 
ing of them. His later books are criticisms of America 
at home rather than abroad. 

Henry B. Fuller, a Chicago author, spent several years 
abroad and wrote his first two and last novels with Euro¬ 
pean settings. He, too, drew his enjoyment from Europe 


69 



CHALLENGE OF MODERN CRITICISM 


because it was different from America. Mrs. Wharton 
is a follower of Henry James. She was educated on 
both sides of the Atlantic, so that she is keenly conscious 
of the contrast between the culture abroad and the general 
lack of it at home. She sees that an Englishman going 
to Italy moves from one set of traditions to another set, 
while an American goes from no traditions to a bewil¬ 
dering array of them. 

While the novelists had been arousing interest over 
the contrast between America and Europe, the critics 
had been doing their bit to define the differences. James 
Huneker, Harry Thurston Peck, W. C. Brownell, each 
in a different way, had been writing about America and 
its relationship to Europe since the 1880’s. Mr. Macy 
said that American literature was a part of English litera¬ 
ture; these critics said that America was the heir to 
Europe in culture as well. The immigrant coming into 
the country compared America with the civilization that 
he had known in his old home. Because he had expected 
much he was often disappointed and wrote bitterly about 
his disillusionment. Americans went abroad and came 
back to compare our culture with that they found across 
the ocean. 

This inclination to compare is human and wise. A 
boy leaving home for the first time to go to college comes 


70 



AMERICA AND THE OLD WORLD 


back to find that the home-town is interesting for reasons 
that he had never noticed before. He is judging it against 
the background of his college halls. In a like manner the 
critics try to estimate America against the background of 
history, or of current life in other countries. They ask: 
What is America? What does it mean? How did it 
get this way? 

Three recent books by Americans which relate us to 
European culture may be used as illustrations. They 
are: Sticks and Stones by Lewis Mumford, published 
in 1924, The Re-discovery of America by Waldo Frank, 

1929, and When the West Is Gone by Frederic Paxson, 

1930. Mr. Mumford’s book deals with American life 
and ideals from the earliest settlement to the present day 
in terms of architecture; Mr. Frank’s book is chiefly his 
torical and philosophical; while Mr. Paxson’s is concen¬ 
trated on the history of the frontier and its influence on 
American life, and the effect that the closing of the fron¬ 
tier has had on the country. They all relate America to 
its background in Europe. They try to answer some 
of the questions that other critics are asking. 

Lewis Mumford has chosen to make his interpretation 
of America in terms of architecture because it is an art 
that is closest to the life of a people. Every person goes 
under a roof at least once in every twenty-four hours. 


71 



CHALLENGE OF MODERN CRITICISM 


Buildings are the homes of family life, of religion, of 
work. They are symptomatic of the life of the nation 
as a whole. He writes in the foreword: “This is an at¬ 
tempt to evaluate architecture in America in terms of 
our civilization. ... I have tried ... to criticize the 
forces that from one age to another have conditioned 
our architecture and altered its forms.” 

America started as an heir to medieval Europe. For 
a hundred years the New England villages carried on 
the tradition of common land and village life that was 
dying in England when the Puritans came to America. 
These communities were the true garden cities of America. 
Into the houses went fine material and careful workman¬ 
ship; the life and the architecture of the first provincial 
period were both sound. The great elm trees that lined 
the streets were an important part of the city plan. They 
softened the bare outlines of the houses—for the Puritan 
was suspicious of ornament—provided shade, and served 
as windbreaks in winter. “Would it be an exaggeration 
to say,” asks Mr. Mumford, “that there has never been 
a more complete and intelligent partnership between the 
earth and man than existed, for a little while, in the old 
New England village? In what other part of the world 
has such an harmonious balance between the natural 
and the social environment been preserved?” 


72 



AMERICA AND THE OLD WORLD 


The New England town expressed the common social, 
political, and religious life of the community, but the 
city of the second period was originated in a trading post 
and was set up for the purpose of gain in money rather 
than use in living. It was laid out, not for the comfort 
of man, but for the benefit of the real estate speculator. 
The gridiron plan of plotting a city—the universal Amer¬ 
ican square blocks—had no relation to human needs. It 
did not provide for a natural center of the city’s activi¬ 
ties; the public buildings might be scattered miles apart, 
as they are in Chicago and New York. It did not provide 
for gardens, nor sunlight for houses, nor for the proper 
use of the natural beauties of the location. It made every 
street a potential business street. 

The decade between 1890 and 1900 saw the rise of 
“the imperial facade” in American architecture. In the 
days of Roman glory the Forum and its adjacent build¬ 
ings made a center for the city, a noble white face to show 
visitors. But the imperial facade masked the worst slums 
of the city. The World’s Columbian Exposition at Chi¬ 
cago in 1893 with its united architectural plan gave the 
stimulus to other cities to make for themselves imperial 
facades. 

This stimulus came at a time when the west had been 
closed to settlement, and the major resources of the coun- 


73 



CHALLENGE OF MODERN CRITICISM 


try had come under the control of centralized capital. It 
was the time of Big Business. Big Business wanted the 
imperial facade so that land values would go up, not 
because it would make the life of the people living in 
the city more comfortable or happier. The town now was 
a spending rather than a producing center. It had money 
to burn and burned it by making a “city beautiful” with 
a towered concrete front behind which swarmed badly 
housed millions. The great amphitheatres and arenas 
such as the Yale Bowl, the Harvard Stadium, and Sol¬ 
dier’s Field in Chicago supplied the places for the foot¬ 
ball games and prize fights that took the place of the 
gladiatorial combats of ancient Rome. Mr. Mumford 
has this to say of the imperial facade in America: 

“Our imperial architecture is an architecture of com¬ 
pensation; it provides grandiloquent stones for people who 
have been deprived of bread and sunlight and all that 
keeps man from becoming vile. Behind the monumental 
facades of our metropolises trudges a landless proletariat, 
doomed to the servile routine of the factory system; and 
beyond the great cities lies a countryside whose goods 
are drained away, whose children are uprooted from the 
soil on the prospects of easy gain and endless amuse¬ 
ments, and whose remaining cultivators are steadily drift¬ 
ing into the ranks of an abject tenantry.” 

In Rome the imperial facade covered a rabble of dirty 


74 



AMERICA AND THE OLD WORLD 


slums; in America it covers districts overpopulated and 
uncomfortable, dwellings that are no longer either houses 
or homes, that are fast becoming only sleeping places and 
storage closets. 

Today America has arrived at the machine age. Every¬ 
thing has become standardized: clothes, amusements, 
education, houses. Building is no longer a direct matter 
of an architects planning and a builder’s construction. 
It is an assembling of machine-made parts. Windows and 
doors, plumbing fixtures, stair rails, cupboards, book 
shelves, are all made by different factories and sent ready 
to nail together. There is little real building except 
among the very rich; there is only assembling. Anyone 
who has tried to get a washbowl in his bathroom high 
enough to fit the comfort of a man six feet tall, or a win¬ 
dow with three panes of glass rather than two, has struck 
the unanswerable argument: “They don’t make them 
that way.” 

Cities are becoming deep canyons between walls; hu¬ 
manity is lost in the machinery that it has created. High 
buildings have shut out the sun, and forced the substi¬ 
tution of electric light. Artificial ventilation has had to 
provide the air that other high buildings shut out. Soon 
buildings may be made without windows; as soon as the 
old prejudice in favor of them—a holdover from the days 


75 



CHALLENGE OF MODERN CRITICISM 


when grass and trees and passing neighbors could be 
seen through them—has been overcome. Many public 
buildings already have rules against opening the windows, 
because an open window interferes with the ventilating 
system. Cities have become so crowded that subways and 
elevated trains must transport workers from home to fac¬ 
tory. Often the entire leisure of a worker is taken up in 
going to and from his place of employment. By making 
the open spaces of the city into building sites the city 
dwellers have been forced to go outside on Sundays and 
holidays if they are ever to see any vegetation or get any 
fresh air. To accommodate them hard roads are built and 
motor cars are sold. Instead of machines making life hap¬ 
pier and more interesting they have done the opposite 
thing; they have made men pay for them and for the 
remedy from them. Buildings have become machines 
and human beings have become machine tenders. 

There have been some attempts to build houses that 
fit the needs of the people who occupy them. The adobe 
houses of California, the classic homes of the south with 
great porches, the square farmhouses of the middle west 
with big living and dining rooms downstairs and many 
small bedrooms upstairs to provide for large families, 
have all been attempts to fit the needs of their occupants. 
But as a whole the residences of America are miscellaneous 


76 



AMERICA AND THE OLD WORLD 


things of all sorts, like the enthusiasms of adolescence. 
Mr. Mumford sees the need for a new unity. “Our 
mechanical and metropolitan civilization, with all its gen¬ 
uine advances, has let certain human elements drop out 
of its scheme; and until we recover these elements our 
civilization will be at loose ends, and our architecture 
will unerringly express the situation. Home, meeting 
place, and factory; polity, culture, and art have still to be 
united and brought together, and this task is one of the 
fundamental tasks of our civilization.” He believes that 
if the cities continue to grow as they have done, they will 
eventually fall under their own weight. 

Mr. Frank in his Re-Discovery of America starts with 
the decline of Europe. Out of old Europe has come new 
America. Early in his book he lists the fourteen general 
convictions that were the basic ideas of life in medieval 
days. They were the convictions that: the universe re¬ 
volves around man, man is the lord of all creatures, his 
reason is absolutely sound, he knows what is good and 
what is evil, the practice of good makes for life and blessed¬ 
ness, divinity is concerned with man’s well-being, the 
senses give us reality, man knows what matter and thought 
are, the law of cause and effect is absolute, time and 
space are real, human individuality exists absolutely in 
Time and Space. All of these convictions have been un- 


77 



CHALLENGE OF MODERN CRITICISM 


settled in modem times. Astronomer, philosopher, and 
physicist have combined to dislodge them. With them 
went the growth of European civilization; out of the de¬ 
cay came the new America. 

He likens man to a savage in a jungle in which the domi¬ 
nant growth is the machine, and where in place of ani¬ 
mals are the pulls of economic forces. So far there has 
been confusion without unity. From the confusion has 
come power, the power of the machine, but instead of 
making the machine serve the ends of man, humanity is 
feeding itself to the machine. The reign of power has 
made men servile; they have lost freedom and creative 
ability. The temple of the gods of power is the skyscraper. 
Mr. Frank lists the cults of power. They are: Success, 
the Machine, Efficiency and Service, the Fraternal Or¬ 
ganization, Sports, Crime, Sex, Humanitarianism, Edu¬ 
cation, and many more. None of them has brought 
happiness or unity to American life. 

We have become, says Mr. Frank, a nation of com¬ 
fort seekers. We have worked hard; we have built a 
nation from the wilderness. Now we want rest. We 
started as hard seekers after power; we have become soft 
consumers of comfort. In physics the energy of motion 
has the tendency to become heat. In man the energy of 
Power flows into the need of comfort. But while heat 


78 



AMERICA AND THE OLD WORLD 


can be turned into motion again, comfort cannot be made 
into power. The lust for comfort does not make fresh 
power. The comfort-seekers become impotent and must 
depend on power for their comfort devices; and if the 
process goes on long enough power will cultivate a race 
so powerless that it will lack the means of even seeking 
comfort. To gain comfort we surround ourselves with 
comfort devices, and do not understand that comfort 
is an inner harmony and not a matter of gas stoves and 
bathtubs, and that a man may be more comfortable work¬ 
ing with a pick and shovel than he is on a coil-spring 
mattress. 

Yet out of the cults of power and the seeking for com¬ 
fort, Mr. Frank can see a hope for the unifying of a people 
in America. The reasons for his hope are these: the 
peculiar energy of the American world, the instinct among 
Americans that they are not well, the loss of interest in 
cures and systems, the fact that the use of the machine has 
connected America and made it one nation, and the fact 
that it is in the blood of Americans to be captured by a 
high ideal. 

America is an unstable land, a growing, unformed 
civilization, such as the Sargasso Sea that Mr. Brooks 
talked about. Many Americans see that power does not 
bring strength, that comfort does not bring ease, that a 


79 



CHALLENGE OF MODERN CRITICISM 


nation with money for its symbol will never have enough 
money. Americans are becoming more interested now 
in literature and art and psychology than in politics, law 
and economics. They have lost interest in the old systems, 
particularly in the system of constitutional law that 
seemed, up to Lincoln’s day, to be the cure for all 
governmental wrongs. Because the machine has made 
America a close-knit nation its people are prepared to 
“behave as Americans, against the possible day when the 
term American will have been endowed with a creative 
value.” And, finally, there is the hope that Americans 
can be captured by a high ideal, as they were captured 
by the ideal of freedom in 1776, and by other ideas in the 
years since then. 

Mr. Mumford and Mr. Frank are idealists and 
optimists. They see hope for America—a better America. 
They do not think that the machine will dominate; Mr. 
Frank can even see good in the machine. Fie thinks that 
a group will arise in America to lead the nation to a 
fulfillment of human possibilities. Mr. Mumford feels 
that there is nothing to prevent our civilization from 
recovering its human base if people so desire. In both 
books the authors say that America started from a decay 
in Europe and that we may come out of our present 
submergence by the machine with new objectives. 


80 



AMERICA AND THE OLD WORLD 


In contrast to these men who think that America may 
advance into new fields of human accomplishment Mr. 
Paxson in When the West Is Gone points to the danger 
that the nation may be going back to the old European 
tradition from whence it came. He is chiefly interested 
in the frontier, in the type of man that the frontier 
developed, and in the results of frontier thinking on 
America. America has been an experiment in nationalism. 
No other country of recent history had the frontier to 
settle as America had, so that no other country developed 
the kind of attitude of mind that Americans have 
developed. The closing of the frontier has brought one 
era to an end and another to a beginning. The frontier 
conquered the immigrant; as he met the frontier he was 
changed into a new person. The pioneers were young, 
they were poor, they had hope. There has never been a 
situation in which more depended upon the physical and 
individual stamina of the man, and less upon birth, 
possessions, or education. Every man was equal if he had 
equal strength; upon the border there was equality of fact. 

Out of the feeling of democracy came five rebellions. 
First was the revolt against England led by George 
Washington. The followers of Washington were 
pioneers, men of the frontier, changed by the frontier, so 
that they could no longer see the right of one man to 


81 



CHALLENGE OF MODERN CRITICISM 


rule another. It was the first triumph of the west over 
the east. But after the war was over the old colonial 
differences of rank survived; the older social systems of 
Europe were imitated. The new pioneers went west to 
the frontier of the Appalachians. They could see no 
value in such class distinctions, so that the second revolu¬ 
tion was against the federalism of Washington. The 
Jeffersonian democracy was a democracy of frontiersmen, 
individualists who had no use for class distinctions, who 
were sure of the equality of all men. Again the west 
triumphed over the east. 

The frontier moved on to the Mississippi Valley, but 
the spirit of the pioneer remained the same. He fought 
much the same conditions that shaped the followers of 
Washington, and this time, when he revolted, he sent 
Andrew Jackson to Washington on the third of the 
waves of liberal opinion. 

The fourth rebellion of the frontier was in 1860 when 
the west formed a new party and elected Abraham 
Lincoln president. By that time there were four sections 
of the United States. Instead of the east and the west, 
there were the east, the middle west, the far west and 
the south. The far west was not the frontier, because 
it had been settled by gold seekers. The middle west 
was the home of the pioneers, the farmers, who found 


82 



AMERICA AND THE OLD WORLD 


life as hard as the early frontiersmen had found it, and 
who had developed the same kind of thinking in conse¬ 
quence. It was the middle west that sent Abraham 
Lincoln to Washington. It was the last successful revolt 
of the frontier against the older and more conservative 
forces of the east. 

In November, 1896, another revolt of western liberalism 
broke out in open battle on the question of free silver. 
It was the fifth of the series of outbreaks for the rights 
of the commoner and liberal thought in America. Each 
of the other outbreaks had upset the balance of our 
politics and had installed new leaders. But in 1896 
history did not repeat itself and the Populist movement, 
led by William Jennings Bryan, failed. William 
McKinley was elected to the presidency. It was the first 
time that a wave of liberal protest coming from the west 
had been defeated by the east. Since then there has been 
no new revolt of any consequence. The east is dominant 
over the west. It is the machine age over the pioneer spirit, 
a return to aristocracy, a turning back to Europe. 

And Mr. Paxson asks if this failure is a sign that the 
human race is full grown, and if no more advance can 
be expected from it. Was what the frontier stood for 
in America merely a flash in the procession of humanity? 
Or was it a new beginning with permanent results for 


83 



CHALLENGE OF MODERN CRITICISM 


human happiness? He wonders what America will do 
with the question of capital and labor, and with the 
problems of international affairs. He does not believe 
that labor will ever form a class in America, because most 
workmen are Americans first and workmen after, and 
because none of them expects to remain a workman always. 
As long as the leaders of labor may rise to be the directors 
of capital there will not be serious labor difficulty. He 
does not believe that democracy is done for, or that, on 
the whole, there is any superior foundation for government 
and the social order than that of the common people who 
live within it. With the state of mind inherited from the 
frontier, America should be the nation to step forward 
to work out a world with a fair balance between national 
control and world fellowship, and bring about a universal 
justice built on law. 


X 


84 



DlSff^W 




FIVE 

AMERICA AT HOME 

W HILE certain novelists had been interested with 
the contrast of America and Europe, there were 
many who were chiefly concerned with the nation at home. 
They had been stirred by the closing of the frontier, the 
standardization imposed on the country by the building 
of railroads, and later by national advertising, the mail 
order houses and the chain stores, and by moving pictures 
and radio. The disclosure of corrupt politics during the 
administration of President Grant had led them to discuss 
the practical workings of a democracy. Henry Adams 
in his anonymous novel, Democracy published in 1879, 
exposed the unscrupulousness of politicians and the 
defects of popular government from the point of view of 
a man who had an intimate knowledge of both. In 
1925 Samuel Hopkins Adams wrote an exposure of 
conditions during the reign of President Harding in 
Revelry that was more vulgar, but just as effective. 

Four years after Democracy John Hay wrote The 


85 









CHALLENGE OF MODERN CRITICISM 


Breadwinners, a novel that sounded the note of alarm 
at the increasing aggressiveness of organized labor. It 
was not a valuable contribution to the understanding of 
the industrial situation, but it did show that something 
was happening. Other writers had clearer visions of what 
that something was. 

In 1893 the editors of The Cosmopolitan, The Argosy, 
and Munseys reduced their prices and began to publish 
personal accounts of famous people and careful studies 
of social life in America. There was no deliberate plan 
to attack existing institutions, but the authors like Tarbell, 
Steffens, and Baker did take up the problems that inter¬ 
ested people and discussed them intelligently. 

With the publication of A Hazard of New Fortunes 
William Dean Howells, most important novelist of his 
day, took up the criticism of society, which he carried 
on until his death. Although he was too mild to cause 
as much disturbance as some of the others his influence 
on contemporary novelists was toward realism and the 
positive presentation of fact. Mark Twain showed his 
disgust with humanity as he saw it in the United States 
in The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg, and The 
$30,000 Bequest . 

Frank Norris, Upton Sinclair, and Jack London tried 
to picture the thing that was coming to pass and each 


86 



AMERICA AT HOME 


made violent attacks on the exploitation of the public 
by organized wealth. Each had a remedy to suggest. 
Mr. Sinclair is opposed to the present economic system, 
and from The Jungle to Boston has been against capi¬ 
talism and for socialism. London recommended revo¬ 
lution as the only means of settling class differences. 
Norris looked forward to a vaguely millenial change 
when human fellowship would prevail. 

Ernest Poole in The Harbor in 1915 wrote with a better 
understanding of the relationship between the capitalist, 
the engineer and the laborer. He dreamed of cooperation 
to some great end. Winston Churchill in A Far Country 
in 1915, and The Dwelling Place of Light in 1917 tried 
to say the same thing, that capital and labor are interde¬ 
pendent and must learn to work together. 

The critics did not get a hearing as soon as the novelists, 
the poets, and the short story writers. For a long time 
after the Civil War, authors like Margaret Deland in the 
Old Chester tales, and Zona Gale in the Friendship 
Village stories built up a tradition of village honesty and 
sweetness. But the World War had its effect on them, 
so that shortly after its close Miss Gale was publishing 
Miss Lulu Bett, Mrs. Deland brought forth The 
Vehement Flame, and Booth Tarkington, who had pre¬ 
viously been both sweet and light, wrote Alice Adams . 


87 



CHALLENGE OF MODERN CRITICISM 


All of them gave pictures of village life that are more 
true than flattering. 

As early as 1883, E. W. Howe wrote The Story of a 
Country Town and had to publish it himself because no 
other publisher thought that anyone would buy such bitter 
realism. Mr. Howe was the first to say that pioneer 
life did not leave nobility in its train, but rather shabbiness, 
poverty, and ugliness. Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius 
wrote in much the same strain in a novel with the sug¬ 
gestive title Dust. But neither of these books brought a 
turn of the tide from such romances as When Knighthood 
Was in Flower and Alice of Old Vincennes . It was a 
book of poetry that did it. 

This was Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology, 
a series of short poems, self-composed epitaphs for the 
tombstones in an imaginary graveyard at Spoon River, 
a little town in central Illinois. They were attacked as 
bitter, cynical, godless, and untrue, mostly by people who 
did not understand them. But they were the final opening 
wedge for criticism of America in literature. Following 
Mr. Masters are any number of novelists, poets, and 
playwrights who criticise life in America. Many of them 
chose the small town as the background for their stories, 
but the criticism is of all American life. Main Street 
by Sinclair Lewis is perhaps the best known. It is a 



AMERICA AT HOME 


vigorous indictment of the ignorance, stupidity, ugliness, 
and lack of any grace of manner or of heart that prevail 
in a small town. He followed it with Babbitt , a much 
better book because it had a real character for a hero. In 
Arrow smith he repeated his charges against the American 
community, but here it is a larger city; in Elmer Gantry 
he returned to the accusation that the community which 
frustrates a good man rewards a charlatan. 

All of this made part of the background that Mr. 
Brooks was anxious to create. The novelists made it 
possible for the critics to get a hearing. Since the World 
War the critics in America have tended to form two 
main groups. There are those who can see no good in 
America, even as there were novelists who could see 
nothing worthy in the life that they were presenting. 
They occupy themselves in showing that America started 
in the gutter and has proceeded to run into the sewer. 
They call attention loud and long to their belief that the 
worst of American life is due to her culture, that the 
best is an accident, and that there is no hope anywhere. 
The other group, usually older than the first, and if not 
wiser, at least quieter, concern themselves with showing 
that there have been some good things about the past, 
and that there may even be some hope for the future if 
some of the present corrupt tendencies can be overcome. 


89 



CHALLENGE OF MODERN CRITICISM 


Civilization in the United States, an Inquiry by Thirty 
Americans published in 1922 is a complete index to the 
mind and emotions of the first group. Recent Gains 
in American Civilization published in 1928 took only 
fifteen “distinguished critics of contemporary life” to cover 
the field. The authors of the first book came together 
because of common interests and beliefs and decided to 
write a series of essays in order “to contribute a definite 
and tangible piece of work toward the advance of 
intellectual life in America. We wished to speak the 
truth as we saw it, in order to do our share in making a 
real civilization possible.” In order to give the book 
unity and authority they decided to exclude any authors 
who were aliens, professional propagandists, or who were 
merely dissatisfied with American life for personal reasons. 
Then they laid on each of their contributors the injunction 
to refrain from mud-balls and vituperation—a bit of a 
problem for some of them, who, like Mr. Mencken and 
Mr. Nathan, make their living by tactics other than 
urbanity. To keep the book unified they decided on three 
major propositions: “First, that in almost every branch 
of American life there is a sharp dichotomy (meaning lack 
of unison) between preaching and practice; we do not 

let our right hand know what our left hand doeth. 

Second, that whatever else American civilization is, it 


90 




AMERICA AT HOME 


is not Anglo-Saxon. . . . Third, that the most moving 
and pathetic fact in the social life of America today is 
emotional and aesthetic starvation.” If these contentions 
seem a bit harsh, says the editor, there is nothing to be 
said except that the contributors were not trying to please 
anyone, but were attempting to understand clearly, and 
clearly to explain what they understood. 

The essays are provocative of thought and emotion, no 
matter on which side of the controversy the reader stands. 
If he agrees, the pronouncements will sound like the words 
of the minor prophets. The Hebrews from Hosea to 
Malachi are no more pungently outspoken than are these 
American critics. “We must change our hearts,” one of 
them cries, “for only so, unless through the humbling of 
calamity or scourge, can true art, and true religion, and 
true personality .... grow up in America.” How¬ 
ever, if the reader is prepared to disagree he will feel the 
stir of old distates for prejudices so often repeated. He 
will read with approval from Stuart Sherman that such 
talk is no more than a bid for notoriety. “I used to think 
that to insult the common sense, and always to speak 
contemptuously of the ‘bourgeoisie’ implied sycophancy, 
either to a corrupt and degenerate aristocracy, or to a 
peculiarly arrogant and atheistical lower class. But our 
‘democratic young people/ as you call them, preserve and 


91 



CHALLENGE OF MODERN CRITICISM 


foster this artistic snobbishness as a form of self-expres¬ 
sion.” This is not a book for the uninformed; there are 
too many opinions, all of them stated with the tone of 
final authority. The authors are not fools or rogues, 
although they may have foolish and roguish capacities. 
Probably the reader will feel as he reads them that these 
Minor Prophets are true to the type described by Edwin 
Arlington Robinson: 

“Who seem to carry branded on their foreheads 
‘We are abstruse , but not quite so abstruse 
As possibly the good Lord may hare wished / 

. . . . men who never quite confess 

That Washington was great;—the kind of men 
That everybody knows and always will ,— 

Shrewd, critical , facetious .... 

And for the most part harmless , Tm afraid.” 

They came together in a series of fortnightly meetings 
for a winter, they engaged to speak the truth about their 
country “without sentimentality and without fear,” they 
were resolved to declare themselves with good temper and 
urbanity. It was a hard task. All of them could face the 
public fearlessly, but they wrote in the fear of each other. 
Some of the others might find them sentimental or 
cowardly! Terrible thought! So they proceeded sternly 
to the disagreeable job, and no matter how it hurt they 
found no good in any American thing. This part was 


92 



AMERICA AT HOME 


fairly simple; they told the awful truth fearlessly, but it 
was a harder matter to be sweet tempered and suave about 
it. Urbanity is not the natural manner of a prophet. 
Some of them, being a bit outside the circle, write with a 
natural geniality, but the inner circle fail to prove their 
editor’s statement that “we are quite gay.” In the end 
the laments rather overshadow the prophecies, and 
weariness overcomes the reader. Yet the insistence on 
restudying the past in America and re-examining the 
present in the light of it is much to the point. 

H. L. Mencken writes about politics in his most 
pungent strain. To wit: 

“If he (the politician) has genuine ability, it is a sort 
of an accident. If he is thoroughly honest, it is next door 
to a miracle. . . . They are, in the overwhelming 

main, shallow fellows, ignorant of the grave matters they 
deal with and too stupid to learn. . . . Examine him 

at leisure and you will find that he is incompetent and 
imbecile, and not only incompetent and imbecile, but also 
incurably dishonest. . . . His outlook, when it is 

honest, is commonly childish—and it is very seldom 
honest. . . . What they know of sound literature 

is what one may get out of McGuffey’s Fifth Reader. 
What they know of political science is the nonsense 
preached in the chautauquas and on the stump. What 
they know of history is the childish stuff taught in 

93 



CHALLENGE OF MODERN CRITICISM 


grammar schools. What they know of the arts and 
sciences—of all the great body of knowledge that is the 
chief intellectual baggage of modern man—is absolutely 
nothing.” 

In his essay on The City Lewis Momford writes a 
preliminary sketch for his later volume Sticks and 
Stones. John Macy deals with Journalism in an ar¬ 
ticle showing that the newspaper in America is a reflection 
of the uniformity, the lack of individuality, of the people. 
The newspapers are as bad as can be, says he, but “The 
American press is an accurate gauge of the American 
mind.” The author of The Law , Zachariah Chafee, Jr., 
succeeds in achieving the urbanity that was the ideal of 
the group. He sees the reasons for the American dis¬ 
trust of law, and has some suggestions to make for 
reforming it, among them the appointment of a Minister 
of Justice. 

Robert Morss Lovett writes on Education and gives 
a careful and penetrating analysis of his subject. He 
sees that the system of education in the United States is 
much like the system of the medieval church, and that 
now as it is turning away from the form brought from 
England it is uncertain of materials or method. He sees 
the value of the specialist to society, but doubts the value 
of specialization to the individual. He doubts, too, the 


94 



AMERICA AT HOME 


value of the increase of elective courses in universities and 
the emphasis on outlines rather than reading and study¬ 
ing the works of authors. He is of the opinion that 
education at present is for the purpose of producing 
belief rather than stimulating thought. 

“Education is the propaganda department of the state 
and the existing social system. Its resolute insistence 
upon the essential rightness of things as they are, coupled 
with its modest promise to reform them if necessary, is 
the basis of the touching confidence with which it is re¬ 
ceived.” 

There are reasons, however, that make him think that 
the old superstition is passing. Everywhere the educated 
are becoming more critical of the results of education, 
and people see too clearly the alliance between education 
and a social system depending on private capital. Educa¬ 
tion does not bring success in life, as everyone can see 
by looking at that educated class, the teachers. Then, 
too, the corrupt political practices connected with the 
schools are becoming too obvious, so that a reform must 
come. Mr. Lovett has two suggestions to make for the 
reform of education. First, it should surrender control 
of the school to the educators. Second, it should cease 
to claim that individual and social salvation lies in it. 
It should lay aside its pomps and ceremonies and its 
flattery to nationalistic and capitalistic ambitions. 

95 



CHALLENGE OF MODERN CRITICISM 


In his essay on Scholarship and Criticism Mr. J. E. 
Spingarn points out three things needed by American 
criticism today. First, education in aesthetic thinking; 
second, scholarship; third, a deeper sensibility. Clarence 
Britten finds little good to say about School and College 
Life . Frank More Colby sees that “there is no such 
thing as an American gift of humorous expression, that 
the sense of humor does not exist among our upper classes, 
especially our upper literary class, that in many respects 
almost every other civilized country in the world has 
more of it.” There are articles on nerves, engineering, 
business, medicine, sex, the family, history, and numerous 
other subjects. The authors have taken all life for their 
province, and in general have found little to love in it. 

The right wing of the discussion comes forward with 
their essays on Recent Gains in American Civilization. 
It is an interesting title, for the authors of all the chapters 
are all men and women well known for so-called radical 
tendencies. They are a group of schooled experts; the 
contents page lists such names as Charles A. Beard, Mary 
Austin, Norman Thomas, Rockwell Kent, Harry Emer¬ 
son Fosdick, David Starr Jordan, and John Dewey. They 
were chosen because they were critics of the existing order. 
Says the editor, Kirby Page, in the foreword: “The chap¬ 
ters recording gains in the various areas have all been 


96 



AMERICA AT HOME 


writen by men and women who were selected because 
they are thoroughly critical of the existing order and who, 
accordingly, are not likely to indulge in facile optimism.” 

And they do not indulge in facile optimism; it is diffi¬ 
cult for them at times to see any gains; all they can do is 
to count the losses and point out how much worse they 
might have been. Charles S. Johnson sees some gains in 
race relations, particularly as regards the negro. They 
are entering colleges with white students; they are finding 
places in art, music and literature; the taboo has been 
taken off the discussion about race relations; lynchings 
have become fewer; and he sees hope ahead. Norman 
Thomas sees an advance in the quest for peace in the 
recent removal of the glamor from war, and in the gen¬ 
eral feeling that something can be done to prevent war. 
However, he is not very hopeful of results for the imme¬ 
diate present. Oswald Garrison Villard sees hope for the 
American Press, although he can see no real gains. The 
schools of journalism and the recently formed Society 
of American Editors are steps in the right direction, ac¬ 
cording to Dallas Lore Sharp. Education has made a 
gain in the better organization of all the department of 
teaching: The National Educational Association, the 
National Council of the Teachers of English, and kin¬ 
dred organizations. Teaching is being fitted to the pupil 


97 



CHALLENGE OF MODERN CRITICISM 


instead of the pupil to the curriculum, and that is a 
great advance. There is much to be done, but, “I doubt 
if there is another two billion dollar enterprise, out of 
which we get so much for our money, one in which they 
are making more rapid and substantial gains, or one 
on which rests so securely the safety of the state and the 
happiness of the people.” It is easy to see that here is 
the sober judgment of older men who are able to see the 
gains so clearly because they have seen so clearly the 
errors and the losses. 

Three of the essays are especially interesting. Charles 
A. Beard writes on Recent Gains in Government , 
Harry Emerson Fosdick contributes the article on Recent 
Gains in Religion , and a summary of all the other 
chapters by John Dewey is placed at the end of the book 
and called A Critique of American Civilization. In 
the beginning Mr. Beard asks if the Congress of the 
United States is any better or any worse than it has been 
at any other time. Then he proceeds to answer the ques¬ 
tion by looking at other periods in the nation’s history. 
Thomas Jefferson, he points out, thought that the mem¬ 
bers of the first congress were lining their pockets with 
gold, and his suspicions have been confirmed by recent 
investigations. Men have, he said, always compared 
our evil statesmen with men like Webster, Hayne, Clay, 


98 



AMERICA AT HOME 


and Calhoun. Granted that they were marvels of intel¬ 
ligence, statesmanship, and character, why did they leave 
the one fundamental problem of their age to be fought 
out on the battlefield? As to their character, he calls 
attention to the men who speculated in western lands while 
they were passing land legislation, and who were paid 
by the banks while they argued for bank laws in the leg¬ 
islature. He asks what significant measure of law and 
public policy any of the United States senates passed be¬ 
tween 1870 and 1900? He comes to the conclusion that 
if the United States Congress is not doing wonders, at 
least it is doing as well as any previous congress did with 
problems that were not one hundredth part as compli¬ 
cated. 

In the closing decades of the nineteenth century the 
liberals were demanding a graduated income tax shifting 
to wealth some of the burden of federal taxation, an in¬ 
heritance tax, a postal savings system, woman suffrage, an 
interstate commerce commission with power to fix rates 
between states. In their day these reforms were de¬ 
nounced, called anarchistic, socialistic, an invasion of the 
rights of man, yet they have all been adopted. Perhaps 
all this was bad, but Mr. Beard contends “that more 
humane and democratic legislation running in the direc¬ 
tion of greater economic justice has been put upon the 


99 



CHALLENGE OF MODERN CRITICISM 


statute books of the United States during the past twenty- 
five years than during the hundred and ten years that 
elapsed between the founding of the federal government 
and the inauguration of Benjamin Harrison.” 

Against the scandals of Daugherty, Fall, Doheny, and 
Sinclair he places the Whisky Ring, the Black Friday 
Episode, and the Mulligan Letters. He sees that the 
government is offering more actual service to the people 
than it ever has before through the Children’s Bureau, 
the Weather Bureau, the Forest Service, and hundreds 
of others like them. More money was spent in the far-off 
golden days to get elected to the United States Senate 
than in these days of general election and public exposures, 
only people then paid no attention to it. Public money is 
being spent more wisely, says Mr. Beard, since the budg¬ 
eting system has come into use, and there is stricter ac¬ 
counting of expenditures. Streets are better paved, schools 
are better, a revolution has been brought about in muni¬ 
cipal sanitation, and attempts are being made toward city 
planning. All of these gains have been brought about 
by the force of public opinion, which, he thinks, will be 
the cause of any other gains the nation may make. 

Mr. Fosdick has a harder task to show the gains in 
religion because, as he points out, religion is in a badly 
muddled condition in the United States. He sees one 


100 



AMERICA AT HOME 


gain in the rapidity with which religious thought is being 
readjusted to the viewpoint of the modern world. A sec¬ 
ond gain is to be found in the fact that the nature of 
religion has become clearer and it has been freed from 
accessory entanglements. Never was it more plain that 
religion is forever rooted in human nature and will always 
mean devotion to the concrete spiritual values, goodness, 
truth, beauty, and love. Another great gain is the recog¬ 
nition on the part of men that religion does not depend on 
any creed, canon or system of theology, that it is a human 
experience that does not need organization to be effective 
to the individual. 

But on the side of organization there are gains as well. 
The membership in Protestant churches in the United 
States between 1915 and 1925 increased slightly more 
rapidly than did the population. The movement toward 
church union is a hopeful sign. Other questions than 
faith in God and the application of Jesus’ teaching to per¬ 
sonal and social life have been thrown aside. And for 
these reasons Mr. Fosdick sees gains in religion in recent 
years, gains that he thinks will result in a renaissance of 
spiritual life in general and religious life in particular 
within the next century. 

Mr. Dewey read eleven of the essays before he wrote his 
A Critique of American Civilization. It is a summary 


101 



CHALLENGE OF MODERN CRITICISM 


of them with an attempt to tell what it all will come to 
in the direction and quality of American life. He finds 
as he looks over American life a curious contradiction. 
In the public organized side of life there is a hardness, a 
standardization, a devotion to mechanical prosperity, 
what the critics of the other wing call the domination 
of the machine. But on the private or individual side 
there is an immense vitality. In the region of politics 
this conflict is evident in the fact that never have citizens 
seemed so indifferent to the corruption of high officials, 
never have they been so negligent about voting, yet at the 
same time there has never been so much exposure and in¬ 
vestigating going on. It seems to mean that the American 
people have given up expecting the traditional political 
institutions to be of service, and are placing their hope 
on something more fundamental than politics. The 
forces of bigotry seem well organized and active, yet in 
1928 for the first time a Roman Catholic was a candidate 
for president and his official opponents made no point of 
the religious issue. While freedom of speech seems to be 
a lost principle in public, in private there has never been 
so much self-examination and self-criticism. Publicly 
America is engaged in an imperial policy; privately her 
citizens are becoming internationally minded. 

In regard to material progress Mr. Dewey is not so 


102 



AMERICA AT HOME 


hopeful. America has made living easy and comfortable, 
but Americans have not built any corresponding advances 
in religion, art or the graces of life on that material foun¬ 
dation. He finds that the nation does read better books 
on the whole, and that the widespread expansion of educa¬ 
tion is a gain. He believes not that America is merely 
a diluted Old World, but that Columbus did discover 
a new one with hope for the future. 




SIX 

THE HUBBUB OVER HUMANISM 

B ACK in 1915 Van Wyck Brooks called for debate 
about America, her ideals and her traditions, and 
her hope for the future. He got his response in the chal¬ 
lenge to tradition led by Mr. Mencken, who gained the 
most listeners because he shouted the loudest; in the de¬ 
fence of tradition, led by Mr. Sherman, who spoke for 
the conservatives; in the attempts to reconsider America 
as an heir to Europe in the books of Lewis Mumford, 
Waldo Frank and Frederic Paxson; in the attempts to 
revaluate America as it stands, by groups of younger 
critics. The concluding step is to note the special focus 
of discussion today on the New Humanism. 

Although Mr. Sherman was the spokesman for the 
party of Culture and Tradition he had three important 
defects: He was not the first of the party in time, he 
was not the first in real authority, and he was not con¬ 
stant in his position. He spoke for them because he was 
able to get a hearing; he could sell copy because he had 


104 











THE HUBBUB OVER HUMANISM 


a style that the public liked and would read. It was a 
controversial style, and the public always has liked a good 
fight, particularly if it was a vicious one and there 
was a chance of seeing one of the opponents hit below 
the belt. 

The real leaders in the defence of tradition were three 
other men, Irving Babbitt, Paul Elmer More, and 
W. C. Brownell. They are all less popular in style, less 
journalistic than Mr. Sherman; therefore they were all 
overlooked for several years. But they went quietly on 
doing their work, publishing books that a few people 
read, until they were called to the front by the movement 
for humanism in 1929 and after. 

These real leaders are now the men in popular esteem. 
While Mr. Mencken and Mr. Sherman were snarling at 
each other over Puritanism and naturalism, Mr. Babbitt, 
a professor at Harvard for thirty-five years was saying in 
his books, “Here is the issue. Consider it.” He started 
in 1908 with Literature and the American College. In 
it he upheld the older classics which are the standards he 
wants to use in measuring modern literature. In The New 
Laokoon in 1910 he repeated that the issue is one of 
standards, balances, and control in American literature. 
He attacked Rousseau as undisciplined, uncultured, lack¬ 
ing in proper sense of proportion, in Rousseau and Ro- 


105 



CHALLENGE OF MODERN CRITICISM 


manticism in 1914. In 1924 two other books Masters of 
French Criticism and Democracy and Leadership carried 
on the plea for fixed standards in ethics, art, criticism, and 
literature. 

Paul Elmer More was first a teacher of Sanskrit and 
Classical Literature and then literary editor of the Inde¬ 
pendent and the New York Evening Post . Later, as 
editor of the Nation, he had an important influence on 
the criticism written in America. In 1904 he began the 
publication of the Shelburne Essays, named for the little 
town in New Hampshire where Mr. More lived when he 
began to write them. He left the editorship of the Nation 
in 1915. Since that he has devoted much of his time to 
writing The Greek Tradition, a five volume work on the 
relation of Greek philosophy to Christian thought. He 
is a frequent contributor to the magazines that have been 
taking part in the humanistic discussion, chiefly the 
Bookman and the Forum. 

W. C. Brownell started in 1888 with the publication of 
French Traits . From then to the publication of Standards 
issued in 1917, Democratic Distinction in America and 
The Spirit of Society in 1927 he always insisted on high 
standards in art and literature. He died in 1928, but 
he had contributed much to the fight for the old tradition 
and to the cause of the humanists. 


106 



THE HUBBUB OVER HUMANISM 


These three are the prophets of the present school of 
humanism. They carry on the work in America that 
Matthew Arnold started before them in England. They 
have their differences, which will be discussed later. 
Around them are a whole crowd of near-humanists, 
pseudo-humanists, and would-be humanists. But the 
time has come to answer the question everyone has been 
asking: “J ust what is all this humanism we have been 
hearing so much about? What does it mean?” 

And they are difficult questions to answer simply. It 
is no new “ism” that has just been invented to give the 
critics something new to quarrel over; it was always here. 
It is as old as the day Adam discovered that he was 
different from the animals that frolicked together in the 
Garden. Although in America the movement is young, 
humanism itself is not. It was a part of the ancient wis¬ 
dom of Greece, Judea, India, and China. It was old by 
the time of the Renaissance, when the word began to be 
used. Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, Horace, Dante, 
Milton, Goethe, Matthew Arnold, Emerson, and Lowell, 
all were humanists. It is a part of the wisdom of any 
age that held that man was higher than the animals, near 
akin to God Himself. 

“Yes,” murmurs the gentle reader, “but what is it?” 

Humanism is an attitude toward life. It is that attitude 


107 



CHALLENGE OF MODERN CRITICISM 


which says: “I am a man with the power to control my¬ 
self. I have the impulses of the brute, but I can direct and 
command those impulses. I am different from the dog 
at my knee because I have will-power. Inherent in me is 
all that is necessary for a complete man.” 

Humanism is the median between two extremes. On 
the one hand is naturalism, on the other is religion. The 
naturalist says: “Man is a physical organism. Every¬ 
thing that I do is determined by my body. The essential 
me is attached to it. It is all I can be absolutely sure of. 
All life is a matter of biology and chemistry. What I 
do is caused by chemical reactions.” Some naturalists 
go even further. They claim that man is determined by 
his appetities—his lust for power, for sexual gratification, 
for domination. Naturalism in literature is apt to stress 
man as brute, as appetite only. That is what Theodore 
Dreiser does in his novels. The Financier is a story of 
the lust for the power of money, The Genius is a tale of 
the desire for fame, The Titan is a tale of the lust for 
domination over fellow men. 

Religion is at the other extreme. The religionist says 
that man is wholly dependent on a supernatural power. 
That only in terms of that supernatural power can men 
write or enjoy literature, that there is an outside power 
to which man is . entirely subject. The naturalist says 


108 



THE HUBBUB OVER HUMANISM 


that man is flesh; the religionist says that man is spirit; 
the humanist says that man is mind and will controlling 
body, and perhaps influenced by spirit. 

The humanists differ greatly in the place they give 
to religion in their definitions of humanism. Many of 
them say that man does not need the intervention of a 
god any more than an animal does. That he has within 
himself the ability to lead a balanced, controlled, poised 
life. They talk a great deal about dualism in humankind, 
the two sides of human nature, the side that is body and 
the side that is spirit. 

In the early days of his writing Mr. Babbitt did not 
think that belief in God was at all essential to a belief 
in humanism. He said that religion need be added only 
if desired. In his essay, Humanism: An Essay at Defini¬ 
tion, included in the volume Humanism and America 
published in 1930, he is more inclined to give religion 
a larger place. He says: 

“Between the humanist and the authentic Christian, 
there is room for important co-operation. . . . One must 
admit an element of truth in the assertion of Plato that 
things human cannot be properly known without a pre¬ 
vious insight into things divine. . . . For my own part, 
I range myself unhesitatingly on the side of the super¬ 
naturalists. Though I see no evidence that humanism 
is necessarily ineffective apart from dogmatic and revealed 

109 



CHALLENGE OF MODERN CRITICISM 


religion, there is, as it seems to me, evidence that it gains 
immensely in effectiveness when it has a background of 
religious insight.” 

Mr. T. S. Eliot, poet and critic, is of the opinion that 
humanism cannot exist without religion. He is equally 
sure that religion cannot exist without humanism. He 
respects humanism without religion, but believes it to be 
sterile; while he thinks that religion without humanism 
produces vulgarities, political compromises, fanaticism, 
and bigotry. He argues for religion because of the emo¬ 
tional discipline it affords, which he believes can be found 
nowhere else. Mr. Paul Elmer More is more explicit. He 
argues that unless the humanists, of which he is one of the 
foremost, do not have the faith and hope of religion, they 
will sink back into naturalism. The forces of naturalism 
are too great, he says, to be successfully opposed unless 
man has the support of the supernatural. 

When, back in 1915, the call to debate was issued, the 
answers were mostly attacks on the old traditions. The 
attackers dynamited the foundations of the old home, 
but they made no effort to supply blue prints for a new 
one. They said defiantly: “Man is an animal. Science 
has showed us that. Let us be natural. Let us do away 
with repressions, if we don’t we may go mad; Freud said 
so. Let us express ourselves. Morals have nothing to 


110 



THE HUBBUB OVER HUMANISM 


do with biology and chemistry, and we are merely bio¬ 
chemical organisms.” 

Naturalism came to mean license. People began to do 
openly the things that they had done secretly. They 
talked a great deal about self-expression without having 
anything much to express. Most of the young writers con¬ 
fused self-expression with sex expression in any case. 
Since sex had been a tabooed subject of conversation and 
of literature they wrote books about it. Sherwood An¬ 
derson, Ben Hecht, Floyd Dell, followed in the path of 
Theodore Dreiser. What they did not realize was that 
they would have written about any other forbidden sub¬ 
ject with as much avidity. If eating—another physical 
necessity—had been a dangerous topic, we would have 
had books filled with food. It was not self-expression so 
much as it was revolt. And in the manner of any revolt 
against repression, it expressed itself in violence. 

But the naturalists had nothing to offer in the way of joy, 
no way to happiness, nor beauty, nor even contentment. 
They could only give pessimism and an ever deepening 
sense of futility. Yet mankind is obsessed with the idea 
of the dignity of the human race. Why should we not be, 
when we have been taught for countless centuries that man 
is formed in the image of God? The naturalists stirred 
up Americans and made them think. If people agreed 


111 



CHALLENGE OF MODERN CRITICISM 


with them it was rather a new idea; if they disagreed, it 
was a theory to be opposed. In any case it took some 
thinking about. Out of that thinking will come some¬ 
thing. It is too early to say just what, perhaps true re¬ 
ligion. At the present time out of it has come humanism. 

Humanism stands for controls, balances, standards of 
life. It would have man cultivate his humanity, those 
traits that make him different from other animals. It 
would have him cultivate poise by moderate and decorous 
living. It would have him normal, if the word can be 
defined. The humanists want a harmonious development 
of body, mind, and, in the case of the religious humanists, 
soul. 

All great art, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, the Bible , 
Shakespeare’s plays, came from men who were humanists. 
The authors felt the dignity and worth of human life and 
wrote about it with restraint and beauty. In literature 
the humanists want to get back to those standards of 
balance, and control and loveliness that the naturalists 
left behind. This is the message that Mr. More, Mr. 
Babbitt, and Mr. Brownell have preached for years. The 
ideas are as old as the human race, and their strength is 
inherent in them. 

Just now the humanists are losing their tempers over 
what they mean by humanism. And the enemies of 


112 



THE HUBBUB OVER HUMANISM 


humanism are making capital out of the disagreements. 
Every humanist has his own ideas of what is in truth 
a rather abstract concept. In the midst of the great con¬ 
troversy with the naturalists there are little quarrels with 
fellow humanists. They need to define their cause. They 
are doing too much exploding and too little explaining. 
They would not have us confuse romanticism—the idea 
put forth by Rousseau that man was naturally good until 
the influences of civilization made him evil—with hu¬ 
manism. They do not believe in the natural goodness 
of man. If man were naturally good he would need no 
control, no balance. They are not altruists. They do not 
believe in service, nor in charity. They do believe that 
man has a will that can control his impulses. The early 
Puritans tried to discover if man had a will free from the 
will of God; then the naturalists argued that man did not 
have a will free from the impulses of his own body; now 
the humanists say that man has a will free to be con¬ 
trolled by his own mind. Failure to exercise this control 
they feel to be the greatest of evils. By using his imagina¬ 
tion and his reason, Mr. Babbitt points out, a man may 
make for himself standards of right living or of good 
literature. Then he can use those standards to direct his 
emotions and desires. The goal of this control is to learn 
to like the right things. The humanists would have man 


113 



CHALLENGE OF MODERN CRITICISM 


obey all three of the ancient precepts: Know thyself. Con¬ 
trol thyself. Deny thyself. 

The humanists of America have come at a time that 
was ready for them. Just as people were a bit weary of 
the pleasant innocuousness of the decades since the Civil 
war and turned with relief to the excitement offered by 
the enemies of tradition and the propounders of natural¬ 
ism, so they grew tired and a bit disgusted by too much 
of the new show. They turned with relief from reading 
unpleasant “slices of life” to the novels of Rafael Sabatini 
and the hair-raising detective tales of the Crime Club. 
Americans were hungry for romanticised crime in 1930 
just as they were anxious for glorified war in the 1880’s. 
There is no better proof that Americans as a whole are 
decent law-abiding people than this same demand for 
detective and crime fiction. People do not rush to read 
about the things they are themselves. It is because crime 
and mystery are so completely divorced from their lives 
that they find them romantic. Romance is the thing one 
isn’t, it dwells in the land just beyond the horizon, it is 
always coming tomorrow. 

The naturalists prepared the way for the humanists; 
the movement caught up with the three leaders of the 
movement and although Mr. Brownell was dead, Mr. 
More and Mr. Babbitt were at the height of their powers 


114 



THE HUBBUB OVER HUMANISM 


and ready to lead the fight that they had so long waged 
almost alone. Fourteen of the humanists published a 
book, Humanism in America , in order to state their views. 
The same year, 1930, an answer was made in a symposium 
called The Critique of Humanism by thirteen opponents 
of their teachings. “Ours is the challenge of culture to 
the anarchy of our times,” declare the authors of Hu¬ 
manism in America. “The keynote of the last decade 
was revolt, but it ended in bafflement and despair. Now 
we come to call you to order.” 

Lewis Trenchard More in his essay on “The Pretensions 
of Science” sees that the scientists have tried to reduce 
all the world to physical rule, but that even the physicists 
have found that there are bounds beyond which they 
cannot go. “Philosophy has demonstrated . . . that 
the mechanistic method can, at best, only picture an ob¬ 
jective world as it seems to us, and not as it is. . . . 
The false pretentions of science must be wholly aban¬ 
doned, and the problems of our destiny be examined by 
a wise judgment drawn from human experience, before 
we can hope for a sane and humanistic philosophy.” 

The two living leaders of the humanistic movement 
each contributes an article to the book. Mr. Babbitt 
writes: Humanism: An Essay at Definition , and Mr. 
More contributes The Humility of Common Sense. 


115 



CHALLENGE OF MODERN CRITICISM 


Mr. Babbitt begins by explaining the origin of the term 
“humanism.” It was first applied in the fifteenth century 
to the students who prefered the humanity of the great 
classic scholars to the excess of divinity in the medieval 
writers. They were encouraged by their studies to aim at 
an harmonious development of their faculties in this world 
rather than an other-worldly happiness. They saw that 
the world would be a better place if more persons made 
sure that they were human before setting out to be 
superhuman. 

The reason for the clash between the humanist and 
the naturalist is, as Mr. Babbitt sees it, that the humanist 
requires a center to which he may refer all his manifold 
experiences, and this the outside world does not supply. 
He must apply to tradition for it, for tradition is the 
expression of the fixed ways in which men have agreed 
to conduct their lives. The naturalist fails to see the 
necessity for the poise and proportion that are at the 
base of humanism. 

Mr. More urges common sense, so that people may 
see where some of the mechanistic theories of the universe 
have failed, and where the naturalistic writers are headed. 
The naturalists have showed that when the higher elements 
of man’s nature have been suppressed, a lower instinct 
has taken its place, and at the last they have attempted 


116 



THE HUBBUB OVER HUMANISM 


to “represent life as an unmitigated flux, which in 
practice, however it may be in literature, means confine¬ 
ment in the mad house.” He is particularly aroused by 
the “stream of consciousness” method of James Joyce, 
just as Mr. Sherman was by the naturalism of Theodore 
Dreiser. “Art may be dehumanized,” says Mr. More, 
“but only in the sense that, having passed beyond the 
representation of men as undifferentiated from animals, 
it undertakes to portray them as complete imbeciles. . . . 
I cannot imagine what lower level of imbecility may 
still be honored with the name of art.” Here is language 
indeed fit for a Mencken. 

Mr. Mather in his essay on the Plight of Our Arts 
is not hopeful. He sees that humanism may produce 
a sort of aristocracy which will foster the artist and provide 
a world in which the artist is not a tolerated alien, but 
solidly at home As a professor at Princeton for years he 
has had his chance to watch the oncoming generation, 
so generously endowed with instruction in art, with open- 
mindedness, with audacity and hopefulness; but they give 
him no hope for the future of humanism. “They think 
life is so simple that they may ignore all the traditional 
solutions for its manifold problems, trusting to their own 
instincts of the moment to meet emergencies that have 
engaged the best wits of generations of sages and saints.” 


117 




CHALLENGE OF MODERN CRITICISM 


Harry Hayden Clark, professor of English at the 
University of Wisconsin, writes on Pandoras Box in 
American Fiction in one of the most interesting of the 
essays. In American literature there have been three 
hopes: first, the hope of a paradise of supernal beauty; 
second, the hope of an American paradise of nature; 
finally, the hope of a paradise within. To the first hope 
we are indebted for the work of Poe and James Branch 
Cabell; to the second hope, that of a physical paradise, 
we owe the miracles of machinery and science of America, 
and the literature such as the novels of Upton Sinclair 
which are social history rather than art. The third hope 
has not had results as yet, but Mr. Clark thinks that 
they may come with humanism. “Let us re-direct the 
joy-giving passion for creation through the matchless 
resources of the realm of the spirit. If both the rarest 
happiness and the rarest beauty are the fruit only of the 
hope of a paradise within, it would appear that American 
fiction would in the future be wise in dealing not with 
escape or the externalities but with the infinite variety and 
eternal mystery of the human soul’s conflict between 
appetite and aspiration on its quest for an exalted inward 
happiness.” 

The book by the anti-humanists, The Critique of 
Humanism, spends no time in outlining a platform for 


118 



THE HUBBUB OVER HUMANISM 


themselves; they devote their pages to bitter attacks on 
the humanists. Most of the names on the title page are 
not so well known, with the possible exception of Burton 
Rascoe, Lewis Mumford, and the editor, C. Hartley 
Grattan. One of them, Bernard Bandler II, has made 
contributions to both books. In the best manner of the 
controversialists they fling words like silly, reactionary, 
old-fogy, Puritan, hide-bound, and ridiculous, at the 
humanists. They could better have used some of the space 
in stating clearly what they did stand for rather than 
storming so petulantly at what they didn’t approve. 

The critics of America are many and their arguments 
are without end. What is a common person to believe? 
Is this nation going to turn into a great city where 
humanity is forgotten and only machines tended by 
unimportant chemical compounds—quaintly called in the 
old fashion, men—will survive? Or are men going to 
forget the ages of struggle they have made in order to 
become something higher than the beasts and in a few 
generations go back to the days before God saw fit to 
give the human animal a soul? Has it been for nothing 
that Socrates lived and thought, that Homer magnified 
the struggles of men into the meetings of heroes, or that 
another and greater taught gentleness and faith and 
kindliness? 


119 



CHALLENGE OF MODERN CRITICISM 


The common person who is not a critic cannot believe 
that any of those things will happen. He looks about 
him and sees that things may be bad, but he wonders 
if they haven’t been bad more or less in every period 
of the world’s history. Isn’t it a difference of kind rather 
than degree? He sees his neighbors going about their 
daily work in a quiet orderly manner. He sits with others 
in his car waiting for the green signal light to flash and 
does not even consider trying to “go through” the red 
light, even though there are no cars coming from the 
other way and no policeman is in sight. He goes for a 
trip through the country using the hard roads that his 
taxes have helped to build, enjoying his own property. 
He stops to ask his way and is astonished to find how 
helpful and kindly strangers can be. He sees the lurid 
crime stories in the newspapers, but they appeal to him 
in much the same way that a good detective tale does. 
He doesn’t think that it is the best of all possible worlds, 
but he knows that it is the best one he has, and it may 
get better in time. He’d do something to make it better 
if he knew just what to do. He doesn’t worry very much 
about it; he has the garden to water when he gets home 
and the children want to go swimming. 

People of America are seeing more and more clearly 
that the machines they have made do not make them 


120 



THE HUBBUB OVER HUMANISM 


happy. More than that, the machines are taking away 
the dignity of human life. Eventually men will turn 
away from the thing that is dwarfing them. It is 
impossible for man ever to get outside his humanity; man 
must be the measure of all things on earth. True as 
have been the criticisms of America’s educational system, 
it cannot be denied by anyone who is in it that of late 
the turn is to the development of personality and individ¬ 
uality. Children are given a choice of twenty subjects 
for study today where they had one fifty years ago. And 
the vast increase in school and college attendance in the 
last twenty years cannot but make for good in the end. 
When many people want something, that thing is bound 
to come to pass. The force of public desire is back of 
most of the changes in the world. Some day people are 
going to want things that are fine and true and beautiful, 
and they will get them. Labor saving devices are giving 
Americans more and more leisure. To use that leisure 
in the way pointed out by the naturalists would make a 
sickening orgy of life. Humanism may point the way 
to traditions of well-ordered existence, to beauty in life 
and in literature, to happiness in human hearts. 

Of late optimism has come to mean, to the critics of 
the antihumanist group, a cowardly refusal to face the 
facts of life. And they seem to feel that the facts are 


121 



CHALLENGE OF MODERN CRITICISM 


always bitter and heartbreaking ones, as if courage and 
kindliness were not facts, as well as greed and cruelty. 
If one is to be in the latest intellectual fashion he must 
adopt a “healthy pessimism.” He does not know that 
optimism and pessimism have to do, not with immediate 
worries, but with ultimate ends, and he hasn’t gotten 
around to thinking about ultimate ends as yet. The 
“healthy pessimist” looks about him and makes the 
discovery that all is not right with the world—whereupon 
he raises a great hue and cry, not realizing that in the 
first two-thirds of recorded history the main social achieve¬ 
ment, after a king and a priest had been provided, was 
the making up of a myth to account for human unhappi¬ 
ness. Pandora’s Box, Adam and Eve, Prometheus, all 
are attempts at an explanation for the unhappiness of 
man. But the shock of the discovery of the world’s 
misery is too much for the healthy pessimist; the times 
are out of joint, and he has no feeling that he was born 
to set them right. Rather he feels that it is his task to 
call attention to them. He is filled with disgust for 
childhood, laughter and sunlight, and with loathing for 
the optimist who, mistakenly, still has hope. He is angry 
at dullness and stupidity. He is irritated by the great 
majority of unthinking people who should be filled with 
despair, but who instead are having a pretty good time 


122 



THE HUBBUB OVER HUMANISM 


as long as their digestions function properly. And he 
has given voice to all these disgusts. 

The tunes that the fiddles first played were strident 
pieces, full of discords, for the fiddlers were fighting the 
sentimentalism and moralism of the recent past. Now a 
new strain has crept in, a note of harmony and dignity. 
Time will tell if it is to be just a note, or if it is the motif 
for the symphony. 


K 


123 












BOOK LISTS 


BOOK LISTS 


Chapter I 

Bourne, Randolph. Youth and Life. 1911. 

Brooks, Van Wyck. America’s Coming of Age. 1915. 
Macy, John. The Spirit of American Literature. 1913. 

Chapter II 

Books by Henry Louis Mencken: 

A Book of Burlesques. 1916. 

A Book of Prefaces . 1917. 

In Defense of Women. 1918. 

The American Language. 1919. 

Prejudices. 1919-27. (6 volumes.) 

Chapter III 

Books by Stuart Pratt Sherman: 

On Contemporary Literature. 1917. 

Americans. 1922. 

The Genius of America. 1923. 

Points of View. 1924. 

Critical Woodcuts. 1926. 

The Main Stream. 1927. 

Chapter IV 

Frank, Waldo. The Re-Discoyery of America. 1929. 
Mumford, Lewis. Sticks and Stones. 1924. 


126 



BOOK LISTS 


Paxson, Frederic. When the West Is Gone. 1930. 
Chapter V 

Civilization in the United States . 1922. 

Recent Gains in American Civilization. 1928. 

Chapter VI 

Humanism in America. 1930. 

The Critique of Humanism. 1930. 

Books by Irving Babbitt: 

Literature and the American College. 1908. 

The New Laokoon. 1910. 

The Masters of Modern French Criticism. 1912. 
Rousseau and Romanticism. 1919. 

Democracy and Leadership. 1924. 

Books by W. C. Brownell: 

French Traits. 1889. 

Victorian Prose Masters. 1901. 

American Prose Masters. 1909. 

Criticism. 1914. 

Standards. 1917. 

Democratic Distinction in America. 1927. 

The Spirit of Society. 1927. 

Books by Paul Elmer More: 

Shelburne Essays. 1904-21. (11 volumes.) 


127 

















































































































